While I agree with not trusting the official calculator, it does have all the changes that went with 8885.
I like your suggestion about the 1m tree abilities. Vampiric Blood and Bone Shield would need a bit of tuning though. Bone Shield at 30s cooldown would be great because it would indirectly deal with the baseline mitigation issue DK's have. With decent amount of avoidance, stretching out bone shield over 30s isn't that hard.
BTW, was the charge depletion minimum moved to 3.5s?
As far as I can tell from checking my fraps stuff, no it's still around 2secs.
As I said, they could just reduce the mitigation of bone shield to fit the 30secs. Vampiric Blood I find to be really weak either way, since it's a cooldown that relies on other people to do anything or close to. I think I might give blood tanking a try next build though, just to check it out. I guess Death Strikes would fix my issues with "oh fuck my bone shield is off and my healer didn't notice yet".
I think Bone Shield probably should have a thirty second cooldown unlike the other one point tanking talents (Vampiric Blood/Unbreakable Armor) because Unholy lacks any sort of mitigation talent within it's higher tiers. Blood is a bit thin on them too but at least has Will of the Necropolis while Frost has both Acclimation AND Guile of Gorefiend in an equivalent tier. With a thirty second cooldown it's noticeably more powerful than the offerings in the Frost or Blood trees but has the drawback of consuming twice the runes to keep up over the course of a fight. It's not much of a drawback admittedly as Unholy Blight applies Blood Plague anyway, so all that is lost is the minor damage from a Plague Strike and 5RP but it's a drawback nonetheless.
As far as I can tell from checking my fraps stuff, no it's still around 2secs.
As I said, they could just reduce the mitigation of bone shield to fit the 30secs. Vampiric Blood I find to be really weak either way, since it's a cooldown that relies on other people to do anything or close to. I think I might give blood tanking a try next build though, just to check it out. I guess Death Strikes would fix my issues with "oh fuck my bone shield is off and my healer didn't notice yet".
Just to comment on Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor. The nice things about Vampiric Blood are that using it doesn't screw up your disease/SS/HB rotation like it does for Unbreakable/Bone Armor and it has some serious potential on high DPS that just isn't lethal, best example being Gurtogg Bloodboil. And then you have Unbreakable Armor which is, by far, the worst of the 3: it doesn't work with spell damage.
And the Death Strike healing while tanking isn't too good unless you're Unholy with Vicious Strike. Even then, the healing is fairly trivial for normal 5 man bosses and it becomes borderline worthless while tanking heroic bosses. Only possible "good use" for them would probably be with Empower Rune Weapon with a IS > PS > DS > Empower > DS > DS.
I also remember a blue poster saying Blood of the North would be brought down to 3 talent points, but that they also felt that with it being 3 talent points it felt like that particular tier was lacking. At the very least I expect the Outbreak/Blood of the North changes to go through since they make sense.
Theorycrafting procedures per role:
DPS = Theory -> Spreadsheet -> Practice
Healing = Theory -> Practice -> Logs
Tanking = Theory -> Theory -> Theory
If a talent changes to a new version that hasn't been seen on that site before, it's probably legit. If it's been reverted to an older state, greater than even odds it's a bug. Use it as a source of new information, don't trust it as a valid changelog.
Blood of the north would be a much better talent if it worked on all blood rune abilities. I use BS a lot while questing if it's a single target, but for tanking or pvp, and mulit-mobs it loses a lot of it's power to almost uselessness.
If that sounds like too much of a euphamism, you could also go with nerf bat.
We have started our big numbers pass on all classes, and as many of you suspected, the death knight's damage was much too high in some situations. For comparison, their sustained dps could be 30% higher than a rogue of similar gear and skill. That's a lot. Remember, a death knight can pack 5 or 6 abilities into a 10-second window. They hit often, like a rogue, but for much bigger numbers.*
I don't want to freak anyone out, which is probably inevitable with a post of this nature, but I also didn't anyone to be unduly shocked if a new build goes out soon.
We need to get more feedback on the death knight talent trees, rotations and abilities, and to some extent that wasn't happening because opponents were dying too fast, or perhaps just because five digit crits are too distracting. We also need to get the game closer to a shippable state, which means making sure the dps of various classes at various levels of gear is more in line. I'm sorry, but from all our tests and number-crunching, DK dps was not in line. I also suspect they aren't the only class in that situation.
If we nerfed DK dps too much, then rest assured, we'll improve it. By many accounts, the class is a pretty fun one to play, and we're not about to let our first new class get largely ignored just because its dps (or tanking for that matter) aren't competitve. As always, feedback on the changes are useful, but try not to fret too much.
Yes, I expect many of you can cite examples where you saw another class one shot an entire group of elites. Those classes are getting adjusted too.
* - there is an expectation that a guy with a giant runeblade should be hitting for really big numbers. An alternative is to keep the Mortal Strike-like crits, but slow down the frequency that they can use those hits. I'm not sure slower rune coolups or expensive abilities would be as fun as the current implementation but it is something we could consider. Another alternative is to nerf DK white damage in order to keep the big numbers, but changing white damage can do very strange things to classes, so we'd prefer to try other routes first.
We think that many of the abilities that scale off of diseases scale too well off those diseases. While it's a perk of Unholy to have 4 diseases, we don't want every DK ability to be doing double damage for Unholy because 4 > 2.
We will probably adjust the numbers a little so that having diseases up still matters a lot, but a little less than it is currently.
-Blood strike is now 50% weapon damage.
-Scourge strike is now 65% weapon damage.
-Frost strike is now 50% weapon damage.
-Plague strike is now 30% weapon damage.
-Might of Mograine dropped to 45% bonus crit damage.
-Flat bonus damage of every weapon special has been reduced.
-Non-weapon specials all took big hits to base damage, no idea if AP scaling has changed as well.
-Several other changes that aren't readily apparent.
On the plus side blood DKs get death runes off Oblit now.
Just off first glance, because Lich King doesn't want to let me on right now, this all looks pretty reasonable. I'm glad to see they didn't go the route of increasing the rune cooldowns instead of nerfing the specials.
"What the poet laments holds for the mathematician. That he writes his works with the blood of his heart."
– Ludwig Boltzmann
Also of note: strikes that formerly had % bonus damage based on the number of diseases now award flat amounts as bonuses (blood, heart, plague, scourge, obliterate).
Between 2 crashes, found out it seems Blight is bugged now, it's back on its old cooldown or something(1min), couldn't reuse it for a while even though I had the RP and it wasn't active. The DPS is probably more balanced now, but damn it feels weird going from 2-3k base hits on most abilities with scourge at 5-6k, to 600-700 per plague and 1600 per scourge. Guess I'll check frost, see how it goes, I wonder if they nerfed other classes damage too, it seems paladins coeffs were nerfed.
Seems like they over nerfed things at this point. Probably doing that so they can gradually balance them out in the long run. Howling blast seems to have taken an ap hit, it's doing about maybe 70% of the damage it was doing yesterday, not counting merciless combat.
Edit: It seems that AP isn't giving any spell power for the moment.
Might have been fixed with the restart. Rune strike was changed as well. Costs 15 RP now and no longer procs off spell crits, only melee special ability.
Last edited by Mild Confusion : 09/06/08 at 1:52 AM.
Is there a reason why every build link is screwed up right now? All the MMO champion one's come up empty and the wotlk.wowhead ones come up only half full. I'm really just trying to find out what to start specing into for leveling. It looks like the concensus is unholy, but I can't find a full example build anywhere.
Death and Decay's damage is now pathetic, at best. 80DPS or with Black Ice, Blessing of Might and Horn of Winter; it certainly isn't sufficient to hold any kind of AoE threat or to pick stuff off healers and such.
Theorycrafting procedures per role:
DPS = Theory -> Spreadsheet -> Practice
Healing = Theory -> Practice -> Logs
Tanking = Theory -> Theory -> Theory
Blizz did this so people would be giving them more feedback about how they like the mechanics of the abilities. The damage is irrelevant.
They want to see stuff like
"Playing unholy makes the rotation very difficult for xyz reasons"
"Obliterate is a cool ability, but it feels almost to needed for all spec due to how it fits into your rotation for xyz reasons"
"After playing unholy and frost I can't imagine playing blood because it's boring compared to the other for xyz reasons"
"Tanking is fun as a deathknight, but it's hard to hold more the X mobs due to xyz reasons"
These are just hollow examples I'm giving as statements blizzard is looking for. Opinions on fun aspects and un-fun aspects of the class. How tough is it to do a rotation on 2 targets, is one tree way more fun then the other, and do certain parts of the talent tree seem really "blah".
They want to avoid the feed back that looks like this
"My obliterate did 13k damage. I like this ability."
"I soloed this mob in this spec due t how much damage I was doing"
"Frost has so much burst damage I'm two shotting clothies."
Sorry to pick on you guys a lot of stuff in this thread has allowed me to follow the DK progression but I just see past couple posts being about how dumb abilities are due to damage.
I don't know if this is an actual bug or just recount not liking the latest patch, but I'm getting a ton of glancing blows. Even Deathcoil is reporting glances. It might be why damage is so much lower than even the nerfs should have resulted in. I'd like to confirm the glances in my combat log, but they took the EU server offline midway through my tests.
Edit: Server up. Seems recount is reporting crits as glances now.
I don't know if this is an actual bug or just recount not liking the latest patch, but I'm getting a ton of glancing blows. Even Deathcoil is reporting glances. It might be why damage is so much lower than even the nerfs should have resulted in. I'd like to confirm the glances in my combat log, but they took the EU server offline midway through my tests.
Edit: Server up. Seems recount is reporting crits as glances now.
yeah noticed the same. recount counts the glancings as crits..
yeah noticed the same. recount counts the glancings as crits..
It's something to do with the combat log parsing-- with the latest beta patch, sct also started reporting tiny numbers in brackets that look like glancing blows on every ability, to the point where I just disabled it because it wasn't very readable anymore.
And I completely agree with Kaveli-- this is one of many tuning passes on the dk's abilities. Overall damage output actually feels normal, at least while grinding in outlands. The only ability that I've used that strikes me as kind of weak at the moment is D&D, which has very low damage but "produces a high amount of threat" now.
Death Coil seems pretty weak too, considering the time it takes to charge and stuff. The melee abilities all got nerfed a lot, which was to be expected, but it seems builds that emphasize passive increase wouldn't be affected as much, like a blood/necrosis build, which increase your base damage mostly. I don't know, I think they'll have to tweak some numbers, some abilities feel way too worthless after current patch to be worth a GCD. I'm not too sure the damage is actually balanced compared to other classes, it seems simply weaker.
Oh well, warhammer OB tomorrow anyway, guess I'll wait it out a bit, not like I can test naxx without a guild on beta it seems, so haven't much to do there anymore until they reopen the closed zones to check the quests out.
As a semi related note, they nerfed tauren racials, making non tauren DKs slightly more viable for tanking. Nightelves also got quite a passive avoidance boost, it seems pretty nice now.
As a semi related note, they nerfed tauren racials, making non tauren DKs slightly more viable for tanking. Nightelves also got quite a passive avoidance boost, it seems pretty nice now.
What did they nerf? I can't see anything different - It's still +5% hp... (tested on a fresh 55 DK tauren @ Eu Beta)
Changes that should be in the next beta push. Bear in mind that some of these may change somewhat or entirely, and there may also be other changes coming in subsequent pushes:
- Endurance: now scales based on base health, to be tuned to approximately a 5% heath increase if the player were wearing green quality gear
I haven't seen this posted anywhere but you can now use deathcoil to heal your ghoul or yourself while lichborne is active (i.e. it actually works now)
Sadly it does not work under any other circumstances.
09/04/08, 9:47 PM
Similar Threads
