Pyros

Retadins were very good for solo farming/leveling until they broke judgements last patch. Dks are currently overtuned though, no question about that, at least for leveling. Unholy or Frost both offers almost no downtime AE based leveling. I grinded my last level as frost, and the only issue was finding enough mobs to AE, killing them in packs of 3-6. Unholy is just as brutal.

We'll see how it goes when they start tuning numbers though, but yeah I guess currently DKs are probably top of the DPS in shitty gear. I can pretty much rip aggro off any tank I've grouped with, so I've resorted to old school DPSing, aka wait for 5sunders(or equivalent). Else I have to clip rotations half way through and it sucks. The limited threat reduction talents might be an issue however.

 

Deathwing

You might want to give destro another try. Sacced VW means you have no need for food/water. Destro doesn't kill as fast as affliction when you're doing the actual killing, but destro more than makes up the time lost because affliction spends a lot of time running after bodies and looting.

 

joe_in_hell

I don't think the gear is so extreme, I got other shoulders/weapon from doing Ramparts and there are quest rewards in HFP which have about the same armor, little lower offensive stats but more stamnia.

 

Fellwraith

Your starting gear is basically the equivalent of BWL gear. You'll find upgrades in most of the zones in outland, but you start out pretty well-equipped to deal with what gets thrown at you. Part of the problem with outland is that a lot of the early quest rewards are paladin plate pieces (heavy on int, mp5 or spell power). Once you make it to Terrokar forest or Nagrand, you'll find lots of upgrades. I think I had replaced just about every single piece of starting gear (except my sigil) by the time I moved to Northrend at 68.


The bigger issue with the class is how the class scales. Everything is multiplicative and it stacks. Several abilities double-dip on stat modifiers.

Necrosis is a great example. It's supposed to be 25% of your attack as shadow damage, but the shadow damage is affected by bloody vengeance and blood presence (it's getting the modifiers on both the auto-attack damage and the shadow damage - so the same modifier affects it twice). If you also have black ice you can get it up to 38% of your attack. With CoE/ebon plague, misery, and shadow-weaving that can be modified even further in a raid (edit: to a total modifier of 49.6%). If you add haste/crit and blood-caked blade into the mix (BCB also has a necrosis effect tied to it), suddenly the class is capable of some pretty ridiculous auto-attack damage - before you do anything but put up your diseases.

If there's a major weakness to the class it's that threat management is difficult (the only modifier you have is 25%, which is less than most dps classes) and it needs some time to get spun up so all of the modifiers are working. It's not very strong from a full stop, but once it gets going it's very effective.

 

Mekila

I hit 80 yesterday and have full pvp gear from Wintergrasp, minus the gloves (hopefully will grab those today). The class scales incredibly well with better gear and our survival is unmatched, with basically having clos every 15 seconds, shield wall and stun immunity every minute, plate armor, and passive spell resistances. Add in some resilience and you live up to the name 'heroic'.

In pvp, I can usually kill people in a Death Grip, Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Frost Strike if any of the last two crit. If they survive, a second Icy touch + Howling blast + Deathcoil/Frost strike will finish them off.


In full pvp gear and all the +str and +ap talents, I'm sitting at almost 2400 ap unbuffed, 17% crit, 600 resilience, 14k armor (in blood/unholy presence), and a whopping 19k hp. Pvp gear seems to suffer from the lack of hit rating, I chose both the hit rating neck and cloak and used hit gems in the red/yellow sockets and am still short of the cap.

With the new arena relic (+400 dmg to Death Coil), Death coils are hitting for 2350. Frost strike is obviously a better chance if you are in melee range, but alas you are snared/rooted a lot without any breaks. Using pure frost damage can be bad when mages put up frost ward or another dk gets Acclimation procs from your icy touch, so using a Death coil in these situations is ideal.

The ability to use three 30 yard range nukes consecutively with a 1 second GCD in unholy presence is also pretty nice

 

Pyros

Where do you get that Death Coil relic? Haven't seen it on the vendors in WG. Also wondering how you get 2400ap as frost spec, you have bladed armor? Green wotlk gems? Other than that, frost is retarded currently in pvp imo, way too easy to completely shut down people and kill them. Chains, howling blast, strangulate, frost strike, plague/bloodstrike if needed, and by the time strangulate is off, you'll get runes back to do chains/howling again. In most case though, just turning on deathchill or getting a machine proc will end the fight in the first rotation. Guess once people start getting this resilience gear it won't be that good but well, the class looks pretty nice now that I have better gear and a refined spec. Destroyed a warrior and a warlock earlier, with IBF/AMS, only had like 300hps left at the end, but I started the fight at 40%hp from catapults damage...

 

Mekila

The relic is sold by the imp. 24/31/16 -- all the %str talents and bladed armor+toughness give you a lot of extra attack power. I'm using some green wotlk gems yes, the str/hit ones.

One question Pyros, have you tested howling blast to see if it scales at all with attack power? I would be sad if its going to be the next eviscerate, where it awesome at the beginning but worthless by end game content

 

Pyros

Oh no I forgot, I gave up the idea last patch when I was doing the AP contribution since it was on 30secs cooldown and had variable damage(so you need a higher sample to figure a decent result), but yeah going to go do it now that it's on 10secs. Considering how hard it hits though, I guess there's at least a bit of ap contribution in it.

Didn't know the imp actually sold stuff, damn tricky blizzard ^^. No wotlk gems either, guess I'll try finding a JC to prospect my saronite ores and get some gems done, sucks having lvl 60 epic pvp gems in my lvl 80 epics ^^.

 

Mekila

yeah I didn't really use death coil much this build until I fought a frost mage - he put up frost ward and I remember it would sometimes reflect my Icy Touch back at me so I decided to Death coil instead... it unexpectantly killed him as Death Coil does quite a bit of dmg with the new gear and relic.

Its not quite frost strike with the double 60% bonuses but it has a 30 yard range and is a different school

 

Fellwraith

Does that sigil benefit from talents and buffs?

The reason I ask is that you could have 4 different personal multipliers that can affect it if it does (bloody vengeance, blood presence, black ice, and morbidity total modifier would be ~75%). It'd be worth about 710 damage (noncrit) a deathcoil with the right build. It's worth even more in a raid where you get misery, CoE, and shadow-weaving. That seems like a lot for a "ranged" slot.

 

Pyros

The sigil increase the base value of deathcoil, so I guess it's added before multiplicative effects. Same deal with bloodstrike and the basic sigil, which is why heart strike which is not affected by it anymore in this build somewhat sucks compared to blood strike. It is definitely better than the bloodstrike sigil for any build but frost I guess(due to frost strike). Note that like every other item like this, it doesn't increase death coil by the full value, but by a % of it since deathcoil is an instant. 43% or whatever it was.

Anyway, tested howling blast in 3 different gear(750ap, 1200ap, 1700ap), 50casts each, then averaged the results. The AP coeff on howling blast is 0.05(well 0.048). Which is, pretty fucking terrible. With all the % modifiers though, I guess a higher coeff would lead to insane scaling issues.

 

Aezoc

I'm only level 65 so far, but I have trouble seeing how this won't be the case. It only crits for 1.5x damage, and it has horrible, horrible AP scaling. The multiplier talents on HB are very nice, but it looks like the damage on it will be nearly flat after hitting 80. Even with it being superior in every way to obliterate for leveling, obliterate scales with AP and weapon upgrades, gets 12% extra crit from talents, and crits for 2x. If it goes live as is, I foresee HB being a staple for the first tier or two of raiding, then not seeing much use.

 

Scraps

At the very least Howling Blast will probably be a better AoE tanking opener than Avenger's Shield ever was. Even on non-debuffed mobs it's going to hit well enough to pull mobs into your DnD.

So, similar to the old Avenger's Shield > Concecration, we get Howling Blast > Death and Decay.

Otherwise AoE tanking rotations involve IT PS Pestilence Blood Boil while waiting for cooldowns, I suppose?

Sorry to sidetrack the discussion from DPS to tanking.

 

Gort

For Frost tanking, I think so. Unholy would probably want to do Icy > Plague > Pest >D&D, and then into BB spam/Scourge spam between disease applications, depending on what exactly the new Scourge strike turns into. I suspect, unless Frost gets a bit more AE damage than I'm interpreting right now, that Unholy may have an edge for AE encounters, between Blight, 15s D&D cooldown, and easier Blood Boil spam with 3x Death Runes from each D&D cast.


Speaking of tanking, though, how is level 80 mitigation/HP looking? I've seen some decent-looking tank gear on the loot tables, but how's it working in practice? I'm assuming our HP pools/AC will be about that of a warrior, with more avoidance? Also, given that Forceful Deflection was rolled in as a base ability, how's the strength->parry conversion working out for us? I've seen a mention here and there in the Profession thread of diminishing returns off parry/dodge rating, so I'm a bit concerned...

 

Fellwraith

Morbidity is a tier 1 talent, it won't be unique to just unholy builds, just about any tanking build is going to have to decide if they want it or not. The opportunity cost is about 3% dodge, if you care about aoe threat you can make the trade-off.

 

Mild Confusion

Wouldn't it be better in the long run for them to nerf HB initial damage, but buff the way it scales? Or perhaps they will adjust the numbers later in the game post expansion when the average DK reaches that level where they need the buff. I'd prefer not to go through the hassle myself and just have them balance it now.

In a full frost build, how useful is runic power mastery? Is the 30 extra RP needed or even useful based on how much frost generates and burns RP? Or is it only good for a talent filler to get to higher levels in the tree? I'm speaking from both a pvp and tanking perspective.

 

Pyros

PvP, not so much, you will rarely be swimming in RP I think, since you need to use abilities to gain it, and you also need to use RP abilities quite often, especially as frost. Antimagic shell, iceboundfortitude, hungering cold, frost strike.

While tanking however, it's quite useful. In set rotations to proc blade barriers, you don't always have the time to use RP dumps, but you can keep a bigger amount without wasting it. Also good while leveling.

 

Scraps

I think the hope is that they see this issue ahead of release and correct it, I'll put it into an in-game bug report, might as well.


While leveling, Runic Power for me ends up working like this - I am usually either starved or capped.

Being capped comes from being just plain lazy and not noticing my RP is full. But it happens often enough even though I have focused on getting better at this that I think it will always be a casual issue for most players. Such as, I fight a mob and pull another, then during that fight maybe I pull a third or a ganker coming my way, and I don't always remember to use all my RP abilities since PvP isn't as much about a steady rotation.

I can't see the benefit in PvE other than tanking. Saving up more RP because you're locked into a more important rotation with rune abilities, then unloading with an extra ability because of the 130 RP might work into a rotation. Maybe it could be sort of like Epidemic in this regard, it allows you to create different rotations? This is likely possible with any situation involving Death and Decay, as the 3 simultaneous rune cooldowns create a larger rune cooldown gap than any other ability, and DnD is used heavily to AoE tank.

In PvP the benefit I can see is for having 130 RP is when planning a combo around the heavier RP abilities like Hungering Cold (60 RP), having an extra 30 RP there to follow it up might be nice. It's kind of like a Rogue saving up a full Energy bar before smashing out three specials in row quickly. With Runic Power Mastery and 130 RP, mid-fight, you could Hungering Cold, get away to bandage or something, and still have have 70 RP ready. Use one rune-powered ability to get the 10 more RP (HB likely), and you can double Coil or double Frost Strike to break the Hungering Cold with a 1-2-3 punch.

It's hard to say this is worth 3 talent points where it is currently, especially as the mid-frost tree has so much more to offer than "bottling up potentially ungained RP". I could see this talent moving to a lower tier and more accessible. Deep Unholy just barely has access to this talent, where I guess one could make a case for it, as could any build looking to feed a summoned Gargoyle and cast Blight regularly.

The real problem I think is that it doesn't help generation at all, just sort of make a larger splash when unloading RP.

 

Cloudgatherer

RPM is pretty worthless IMO. The 30 runic power it grants is pretty minor, especially given how Chill of the Grave is working currently, it isn't at all hard to generate RP. I have had no incentive to invest points in this talent every time I go up the frost tree when doing a frost tanking build, the alternatives to invest in are better to me. There really aren't any abilities that require massive RP in frost, Hungering Cold is only 60 and that you can easily pick up in 1 rotation. I agree that it is currently in an odd place, it would be much better served as a T3 talent (below Nerves seems appropriate), allowing Unholy specs to pick it up just after grabbing Black Ice.

 

Mekila

Pyros, did they change the coefficient of Icy Touch? I was asked to explain this sort of damage:

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/2554/hb2kg7.jpg

Defensive stance and above 35%, 669 resilience.

Icy Touch was the opening move... I thought I figured it out by adding blood presence damage but by this screenshot you can see there was only one second between the two spells, indicating unholy presence.

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/3352/hbwd9.jpg

That is a Howling Blast crit I thought we would never see due to it scaling with a 0.048 coefficient?

edit: I have a feeling that he was around 10k hp before he got hit by the icy touch and autoswing, which put him around 7k hp which is 35%. That explains the huge crit on Howling Blast, but the Icy touch math doesn't add up unless they did something to the modifier.

 

Aezoc

I've been kind of leery of balance discussions since the blue posters have said over and over they're trying to get the feel of the DK right for now, and they'll do number balancing later. But one thing I keep coming back to is Butchery. Getting 20 RP per mob is crazy good, and I think it's contributing a lot to DKs' impressive mob grinding. It feels like I'm just swimming in RP with this talent, I can spam my RP abilities whenever I want and still be nearly topped off after every fight. And I don't know how they can balance the DPS of RP abilities while leveling with it as is, because the difference between how often you can use them with and without Butchery is enormous.

I'm thinking the RP per mob should be reduced, and maybe up the RP over time to 3/6 per 10 secs or something. Currently it's just amazing for leveling, but as a PvP or group PvE talent, it's pretty meh. Trouble is, every DPS spec going down blood will be forced to pick it up just for lack of options. If they're fine with it being primarily a leveling talent (and lots of other classes have talents like that, so maybe they are), then maybe they could just add a fourth option to the first tier of blood. But it'd be nice to see it useful at level 80 too.

 

Foundry

Butchery in it's present form seems ok to me. It doesn't scale, RP costs remain the same most of the time.

I view the RP on kill portion as a solo benefit, and the in combat RP generation as the level 80 in-party or raid based benefit. Having played a warrior on Live for many years, there is a difference when you have Anger Management and when you don't, but warriors get rage while soloing from taking hits. DK's only get RP from skill or talents like this. I'm running around in a frost spec and Butchery definitely makes a difference while I'm questing as it reduces my downtime a little and allows for flexibility. Minimising downtime (not necessarily eliminating it) is a good thing. From that point of view I think it has a great balance as it is.

I'm not aware of any shaman skill requiring the killing blow, please correct me if there is, but I can tell you that Victory Rush does not light up a huge amount in PvE groups. It does enough to use it when it does, and only on trash never on bosses of course, but it's not reliable or something constant. In the same way, the 20RP won't happen constantly either I don't think.

 

Caggy

I originally would get butchery for the rp5 talent, but we're talking 1 per 5 instead of AM's 1 per 3, and also about abilities that use 40 rp vs 15-30. Its better use is to counteract decay, but that's also pretty much designed for grinding. The other idea is to take BB for some sort of psudo tanking thing. As it is though I haven't had problems with just the passive rp gain.

 

Pyros

Not sure if they changed the coeff, but well at 80 you get a new rank, they added Rime, so Icy Touch in frost spec does quite a lot of damage. You can also consider he might have had Cinderglacier proced(lasts 30secs, or is it 20). It does look like crit damage though, weird that it doesn't say it's a crit. Did the enrage proc off another attack in this fight, or does enrage proc off normal attacks now? Could be an issue with resilience absorbing the crit, but still doing crit damage due to whatever reason? Only explanation I can find is, either a bug due to whatever reason not showing a crit on log(numbers with 2k AP would roughly give that value on a crit with all talents), or the guy had a serpent sting on him.

Howling blast does high damage, the coeff isn't very important, it hits for like 1800base without any talent on a frost fever target, you slap all the modifiers.
Rime +30%, Glacier Rot +10%, Black Ice +15%, Tundra Stalker +10% so +65% base, about 3k damage, then it's a crit, so 195% damage with Guile of the Gorefiend, ~6k. If the guy was under 35%, slap 60% more, and you're into the 10k damage range.

Overall I think frost damage is currently quite weird, I don't know how it'll scale on the long term, but considering it's the best PvP spec to begin with due to utility(chillblains, frost fever on chains of ice, hungering cold, acclimatation, free mind freeze), if it stays that way, there will be no stopping the tears of S1 PvPers.

 

Foundry

Small correction. Last time I checked it was 2RP/5sec with 2/2 Butchery, both in beta build at the moment, and in talent calcs. Blizzard did bring it down from 2RP/3sec in an older build. I remember calculating it at 40RP passive in combat which I did think was too high.

Now, it's 24RP per min in combat passively, with a secondary effect as well that is mainly for soloing.

Ability comparison to any class in terms of resource cost to effective skill usage is probably not possible since we have no idea how far out of whack damage is at the moment, as Blizzard acknowledge.