Scraps

Well said, it was really sexy as a mini-Curse of Tongues and helped land interrupts. I'd actually rather it affected ranged and casting speed instead of melee attack speed, given the choice.

 

orionsfinger

It's kind of funny how DKs are supposed to be designed for tanking casters and the attack speed debuff only applies to melee. As far as raids are concerned, i see rather than picking and choosing what classes get to come, those raids will be picking and choosing what abilities a certain class in the raid gets to use and what not to use. An example of this would be having a warrior with imp TC and a DK with imp Icy Touch. Barring the fact that right now imp TC slows the targets attacks 2% more than imp Icy, the current iteration of frost to a degree, depends on having frost fever applied to the target for howling blast damage. If Icy Touch is used as the primary vehicle for Frost Fever, and the DK is just dpsing while a warrior tanks, not only is the damage output of howling blast gimped, but, they are deprived of a much needed disease application. Without which, blood strike, and obliterate damage, and Death Strike healing also is less than optimal.

 

Zurai

Frost Fever still does damage even if it doesn't slow the target due to stacking issues, which means it'll still be on the target since DOTs never fail to apply barring resistances/immunities. You won't be gimped because there's someone else with a melee slow in the group/raid.

 

orionsfinger

Frost Fever does not do any direct damage. It only slows the target... here's the tooltip from Icy Touch rank 5: "Chills the target for 244 to 244 Frost damage and infects them with Frost Fever, a disease that reduces ranged, melee attack, and casting speed by 15% for 12 sec." if TC is applied, frost fever will not land or will overwrite TC depending on how blizz works it. It's not big deal if things work out to overwrite equal spells. except for the warrior who sees his TC fall off and immediately re-applys it. Again, this leads back to my thought of the raid leader telling certain classes when and when not to use an ability.

 

Fellwraith

Frost fever does damage in the current beta build. Either that or my combat log is lying to me and people are dying from it for no good reason.

Frost Fever - Spell - World of Warcraft

Check out effect #1.

 

Zurai

It does and it has and it always has. It's not like this is some new change ... I've said it before and I'll say it again: You don't get the whole picture from the tooltips in beta. The tooltips aren't changed as often as the abilities are, and even when they ARE changed, they frequently don't list everything that an ability does. Hell, it took Blizzard until long after Burning Crusade's release to adjust the tooltip for Steady Shot to list its actual correct damage range.

 

orionsfinger

Frost fever does damage in the current beta build. Either that or my combat log is lying to me and people are dying from it for no good reason.

Frost Fever - Spell - World of Warcraft

Check out effect #1.[/quote]



I never noticed that. thanks

 

Pyros

Frost fever will still stack with any of the other melee slow, but the slow part of it will not stack, that's all. I think it might be the same with CoE and ebon plaguebringer. If you bring both an aff lock with imp CoE and an unholy DK, you'd probably have both up, because the secondary effects are different, so you'd have the -resist of CoE and the +disease damage from ebonplaguebring(from the first talent). Well, if they kept the -resist on CoE, unsure about that, but that's how I see it. You'd still only get 13% spell dmg out of them. If they made mutally exclude each other with "A more powerful spell is already in effect" errors, they need to make icy touch superior in priority to the others, and probably feral disease next since it's a disease and have secondary effects(increasing DK damage currently).

 

Scraps

Even with a Warrior with Imp TC, you would still apply Icy Touch as normal in your rotation. Frost Fever would deal it's DoT damage and your attacks would get credit for the disease portion. The strongest debuff would be the only one taking effect, instead of stacking.

From the Blizzard post: (Source)

I mean, that should make it pretty clear to anyone who actually read the wall of text crit that was this news. But just in case, here's an interesting example:

The interesting thing about this example is that this is a single buff that gives +%Spirit and +%Intellect, but if someone provides a buff that is better than a part of it, only that specific stat will be improved by the new buff, and Fel Intelligence will continue to buff the other stat.

I guess this is similar to a player buffed with Mark of the Wild, which provides +spell resistances to all schools. Then if they are buffed with a Priest's Shadow Resistance buff, it won't stack, it will ignore the +shadow resistance MotW provides and take the Shadow Resistance Buff's higher value.

 

Serf

Regarding the earlier conversation about RPM: Wouldn't it be worth taking anyways due to the +12% spell damage, +12% death coil healing, and 3% increased IBF damage reduction? I'd think what with the absolutely yummy early frost spec talents, that it'd be easy enough to make your way down to it and be effective while doing so.

For a heavy unholy spec, I was thinking something like this, considering RPM...

Frost 19 / Unholy 52

Or, should the ebenfit of RPM be not worth it, would Blood 9 / Frost 10 / Unholy 51 work better? or something entirely different?

 

Scraps

Unfortunately you are looking at a talent tree from a previous patch, RPM has been drastically changed. WorldofWarcraft.com is a little bit slow to update their calculator.

Check out the newest revisions to the Death Knight's talent trees at MMO-Champion here:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight

I normally prefer wowhead.com but even they have been a few steps behind mmo-champion recently in terms of beta information update speed.

 

Serf

Oh, ew. Yeah, that is a huge, horrible change. I usually use wowhead myself, but they are firmly in the camp of "until it hits live beta, we don't advertise it", so that's understandable. Thanks for linking me to the most up-to-date calculator, however.

 

Pyros

Wowhead updates a day after mmochamp pretty much, so it's almost always accurate but on patch days(like later today). The official calculator has lagged behind and shouldn't be used for anything.

As for RPM, I think the new one is simplier to use, and still is quite useful. It just has different uses compared to the one before. It's good for tanking, and for pvp depending on how you want to play, and it's also useful for leveling.

 

PSGarak

Not really. Fel Intelligence has been reworked to provide flat +stat effects like AI/DS instead of a percent increase like BoK, and the amount it gives is explicitly lower than either AI or DS. Focus Magic/Demonic Pact/Improved Divine Spirit/Totem of Wrath, on the other hand, are probably working that way. Blizzard said that buff category is going to be fairly unique in how things scale differently.

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

 

Lanlaorn

How long does Desecration last? For an Unholy build that has 4 diseases with Unholy Blight up (right?) spamming Obliterate every UF makes a lot of sense, so I always 3/5 or so would be sufficient for 100% uptime, but in the build just linked 1/5 or 20% chance is used. Is that really enough for 100% desecration?

 

Zurai

I believe it lasts either 10 or 15 seconds, just from eyeballing it. I wouldn't want to leave it to a 20% proc rate on an ability you can use, at most, 5 times in 20 seconds, though. The duration isn't long enough for that for sure.

If you're using 3 obliterates every 2 cycles, you can probably get away with 3/5 or 4/5 in Desecrate. Any less and I don't think you'd have a very good uptime on the effect.

 

Pyros

Thottbot says 15secs, from datamined info I guess. That sounds about right, so you could probably save a few points from it. 1/5 is probably too low for a decent uptime though, but 3/5 should be alright for a 90+% uptime. Someone with more math knowledge could find out exactly, but I'll go with that ^^.

 

Pyros

New talents are up, as usual, list of the new stuff:

Improved Icy touch increase melee speed reduction by 6% total, up from 3, probably a nerf of the base ability to compensate.
Toughness reduces duration of snares by 10% per point, on top of its old effect
Howling Blast cd down to 6secs from 10
Reaping changed from affecting D&D runes to affecting Bloodboil and Pestilence runes
Scourge Strike changed to its finisher type move, seems extremly powerful currently, since it ignores armor and do close to obliterate damage

Don't see anything new in blood, so that seems like a rather "light" patch, but I suspect unholy and frost are becoming even more crazy with scourge strike and howling blast changes.

 

Deathwing

8885 build is up, here are the talent changes I can detect:

Blood:
Bloody Vengeance covers Frost damage as well as Shadow and Physical
Heart Strike maybe nerfed? Max rank seems to be 60% weapon damage + 72...probably an error

Frost:
Toughness reduces the duration movement impairing effects by 10% per rank in addition to old effect.
Improved Icy Touch increases attack speed slow by 2% per rank
Howling Blast top rank damage nerfed. 810 -> 648. Cooldown reduced to 6s.

Unholy:
Reaping changed to key off Pestilence or Blood Boil
Corpse Explosion still shadow damage(thought they were changing this)
Demand renamed Dark Command
Desecrate keys off Plague Strike now
Scourge Strike is now 100% weapon damage + X damage and 50% additional for each disease as shadow damage. Max rank X is 333. I imagine cost is 1F/1U.


Howling Blast changes are a bit perplexing. Still need more information to see if scaling is abysmal. Could be an overall boost. 6s cooldown seems weird, specifically because it's incongruous with rune recharge.

Reaping seems like an improvement, but really they should fix Blood Strike instead of giving us ways to avoid using it.

Scourge Strike seems unimaginative...they really couldn't have just stuck a talent in there that gave a major boost to Obliterate?


Oh, as for desecrate uptime:

1 - (1 - C)^(plague strikes per 15s)

C = chance for obliterate to happen on a plague strike.

 

• CureFC

The HB cooldown change will be nice with Blood of the North. Let's you fit a second blast into the second half of your rotation when you have the death runes up rather than doubling up on Icy Touch.

 

Pyros

Dark Command is a very basic taunt ability, 10secs cooldown base(talented to 8secs), taunts one target for 3secs.
Rune Strike is now truly instant
New ability: Horn of Winter, 2min duration, 20RP, buffs str/agi(+155 for last rank), 30y range raid aura

 

Septus

Weird, so DKs have two single target taunts now?

I don't suppose one of them(Death Grip?) will be like mocking blow and not generate any permanent threat?

 

Pyros

Death Grip is still a normal 3secs full taunt too, but it's ranged. So yeah, DKs have 2 single target taunt, one on a long cooldown that's 30y range, and the basic warrior taunt, no more AE taunts. DKs arguably have the best AE threat tools though, or very close to paladins, so I guess it works out.


Edit: Edit to limit the number of new posts I make consecutively, been to wintergrasp, they changed it into something much more functional(but not that great imo, 30mins break between phases somewhat kill the action, and you need to redo ranks every game so getting tot he siege vehicles takes some time). Anyway, few things I noticed:

First, desecration on plaguestrike is awesome. I'm tank speced currently, but still have desecration, and it's quite nice for pvp since it gives you a 10%dmg 50%snare on first hit, until the guy runs out, but a nice change. Scourge Strike is just like I expected it. I hit a 80warrior in what looked like the lvl 80 blue pvp gear for 9800 crit. With 1700AP, and 3diseases(the base2 and ebonplague). Funny thing is, I did it like 3times in a row, I'm sure he hates life now.

Also, I got my ass kicked by some DKs, and came back as a ghoul(have ghoul stuff in my build atm), and to my surprise, when you come back as a ghoul, you do shitload of damage. Unsure if it's new, but I was clawing for ~1k, on a 80DK. That's pretty nice damage, especially since you come back with full energy now. I actually managed to finish a guy and put the warrior from 100 to 20% while in ghoul form.

Current runestrike is off the GCD, and it's pretty much like expected, you work it in macros if you don't want to be bothered by it. It doesn't proc off special melee crits, but procs off spellcrits and autoattack crits. It's affected by everything that seems to affect normal melee attacks, since it seems to do the same damage as white hits. It's also a bit laggy, doesn't light up right away, but well might be due to my ping on beta servers(280ish).

Howling Blast coeff is still 0.05, so it's not really any better now, it does less burst but you can resuse it more often I guess, at least when you get death runes. Seems like an overall nerf.

 

Buanna

I still don't understand the motivation here. If I'm in a situation where I want to use Pestilence/Blood Boil at all, then I'm in a situation where I want to use them more often, not less. Changing runes into Death Runes is a system to turn junk runes into more usable ones.

*edit* Nevermind, new Scourgebliterate is in.

Boni and Bonii are not words.
Bonuses is.

 

Sinzar

The 2 deathknight taunts have a shared cooldown. If you use Dark Command, Death Grip gets put on cooldown for 10 seconds, and if you use Death Grip, Dark Command is put on cooldown for 35 seconds.