Mountie

I agree with your point, but when you convert blood to death runes, IT spam for RP is typically what's done. Or was...the abilities all kind of suck now so I dunno how things will work. But prior to the two most recent nerfs, on a single target, Leading with IT, PS, HB the most natural use of the death runes, was hitting IT two more times. Making that talent pretty solid I think. The free HB also means your F/U rune could be used for Obliterate instead.

The issue is more the cooldown limiting HB really.

But that's assuming abilities are worth using, so I dunno, it's up in the air now.

 

Mild Confusion

Maybe if they changed it to have some synergy with the 2 rune abilities in frost. Say it reduces the RP cost of frost strike by 3/6/10 rp and reduces the cooldown of hungering cold by 5/10/15 seconds. I could see a use in that.

 

Lujaar

Some thoughts on blood/frost and ghouls:

I don't think Blizzard's figured out what they want to do with ghouls yet, but in their current form they're not something I'd want to be stuck with for raid DPS. A DPS pet that's summoned on a 5-minute cooldown is a serious design problem that's just not going to play well with certain raid encounters.

The ghouls do decent enough damage that you're gimping yourself by not pulling them out, even as blood or frost. I usually don't bother with them for levelling if I don't have Master of Ghouls, but in a raid environment where you're trying to maximize DPS there's no reason not to. So blood and frost get a decent chunk of damage from a pet that has to live for 3.5 minutes and that we have zero control over. Ghouls are dumb creatures. They don't seem to be any smarter than shamans' elementals, which are the most retarded, suicidal creatures in World of Warcraft. Ghouls are going to stand in fire.

Ghouls being dumb isn't necessarily a problem - as blood or frost, your ghoul is supposed to be fire-and-forget - but them being dumb AND not resummonable AND doing nontrivial DPS is a problem. I don't want to lose 10% or however much DPS because my ghoul got itself killed 2 seconds into a fight and there was nothing I could do about it.

I'm sure this is going to get looked at later, given the number of ghoul-related mechanics that are bugged right now. At the least I'd like to either see blood/frost get pet bars, or blood/frost ghouls have a much lower duration (1m duration/5m CD), and have that DPS be redistributed to abilities that are under the player's control. The current middle ground doesn't work and it leaves too much blood/frost DPS tied up in an uncontrolled, unreliable mechanic.

 

Aeryn

It always seemed strange to me that an AoE attack like HB would be favored against single targets over a single target ability like Obliterate. That doesn't make any sense. So if it's hard to determine which is better against single targets, maybe obliterate still doesn't do enough damage, or HB is still doing too much...

 

Mild Confusion

I still feel that HB should have the advantage over obliterate. The differences between the 2 abilities are quiet notable, so it would be difficult to balance them properly. HB only needs 1 disease to be effective while OB gets advantages from 2+. How they crit is another factor. Melee crit will usually be higher than spell crit on a DK from what ever agility bonus he may get (but that's subjective with gear).

The biggest is that for HB to be effective on multiple targets, you need to burn 3 runes instead for 2. Using pestilence is a factor as well. That's another GCD making HB even more difficult to use. Then the 6 second cooldown comes into effect. Considering this, HB is even weaker than initially thought or if not weaker, more of a pain to use to its fullest potential.

I guess I get my bias from playing a warrior. I see 31 point talents such as mortal strike being strickly superior to all other abilites. I suppose the devs are trying to get away from that rationalization. Still, I can't help but want to use HB over OB.


Off this topic:

Ghostcrawler is asking about runic power generation rates. He wants to know if DK's generate RP fast enough. Later in the thread (page 3, 57th post) he concludes that RP generation is fine, but that runic power dumps are too weak to be worth a GCD. Hopefully this means a buff to RP dumps later down the line. Source.

 

Darkrenown

A couple of Ghoul changes: GC says Master of Ghouls is intended to give a perma-ghoul, you should only lose it if it gets killed. Also:
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Master of Ghouls?
Although Ravenous Dead doesn't currently affect the CD, it increases the uptime. Maybe that's what she meant.

I did a fair bit of tanking on my DK tonight, build was:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...03150003113151
level 75. Not really a tanking build but then the leveling dungeons are meant to be doable in greens and offspecs. Gear was mainly the Cobalt set and saronite boots, had about 12k HP buffed and 11.5k armour. ~30% avoidence IIRC.

I tanked: UK, Nexus, AN and AK. We didn't wipe untill AK where something called a Deep Crawler hit me with Fatal Sting for 7k+. Wiped a couple of times due to that, once on a bad pull and once on the floating boss when someone pulled adds.

My impressions were pretty good, but I think DK tanking lacks in a few important areas.

One is snap aggro. On my warrior I am used to running in and opening with a shield slam, bam: aggro. On a DK I really need to put up my diseases first and then hit SS. It's not too bad on single targets, but on multimob pulls it's quite annoying. On any pull where I didn't have UB ready, either due to lack of RP or it being on CD, I had a choice. Either I could open with D&D then pop IT and PS on the first target and pestilence, or I could IT and PS the first target then pestilence, BB, SS. The first is a bit more AoE aggro, the second is more on the first target, but both felt worse than popping a shield slam on the first target and then thunder clapping/tab devasting. Triggerhappy DPS will be the bane of any DK tank, even moreso than with other tanking classes.

When I could UB on the pull it was much smoother. Run in, UB, IT, pestilence, SS, then if I have a death rune I can SS again or just hit BB. Frost seems like it'd be nice for large packs with HB if it did decent DPS, but I'd hate to multitank as Blood.

It's be kinda hard to give DKs a nice snap aggro move, I think, the whole idea is we need to stack our diseases to hit hard, so I think the best solution would be more damage on D&D so that opening with that gives decent aggro on all the mobs while you can use your remaind runes on the first target. Blood could also use something extra for multimob tanking. Perhaps something like Swipe or cleave, or maybe Vampirc blood could become more vampric. Rather like Thorns or Damage Shield it could damage mobs that hit you and also heal you a bit.

I also really felt the lack of an AoE taunt a few times. Every once in a while something goes wrong: Someone AoEs too soon, somone wasn't at full hp and the healer lands a huge heal just after you've pulled but before you've actually hit the mobs, someone else pulls before you, or every dps attacks a random target and mobs go running in several directions. At that point on my warrior I could just challanging shout and gather everything up and start building threat. On my DK however I can only taunt one mob from melee range and mocking blow another at range. There could be 2-4 other mobs still running around free. What can a DK do then? Try to catch them all with D&D? Only works if they're bunched up and even then only if the puller doesn't have too much threat. You also don't really have many spare runes, as you'll likely want to IT, PS and SS the mob you taunted before it goes running off again. This would be a handy time for Hungering Cold if you were Frost, had RP and it wasn't on CD. Unholy could slow stuff a bit if they mobs run trhough desecretion, but what could blood do? Chains of Ice 1 or 2? Some kind of AoE taunt is really needed IMO.

 

Zurai

Snap aggro as Unholy is easy. IT->Blood Boil->Blood Boil. BB doesn't deal extra damage per-disease, so the IT is enough to get nearly-full damage out of it (missing Rage of Rivendare and Desecration), and as a deep Unholy spec it does quite a bit of damage - more than blood strike and more than half of a non-crit Scourge Strike. On top of that, you can do it while the mob is still running towards you from the pull, since it's a ranged attack And, of course, it triggers Reaping if you have it.

 

Ghraabthar

Was thinking about how Frost in its current form may be better than what we are lead to believe. Due to the design of the class, it seems like maximizing DPS will be all about using every last GCD possible to do damage with no interruptions. The assests for frost seem to be the ability to spam Obliterate, using a combination of Blood of the North generated death runes and Annihilation. Here is the spec I had envisioned:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

Additional setup would be to use Glyphs of Icy Touch (10% less dmg but 10 more RP) and Obliterate (20% more weapon damage with 50% less bonus damage per disease).

Now the rotation itself I broke down into four 10 sec blocks, the equivalent of 6 GCDs.

1) IT-PS-BS-BS-O-FS: Net 50 RP after this rotation (30+10+10+10+10-40+20 rp for 10 secs elapsed with Butchery)
2) x-O-FS-O-FS-O: Net 20 RP after this rotation (50+10-40+10-40+10+20)
3) IT-PS-BS-BS-O-FS: Net 70 RP at this point (same gain as the first rotation)
4) x-O-FS-O-FS-O: Net 40 RP

The x indicates the 1.5 secs where you are waiting for the U rune to refresh from the previous rotation so that you can use Obliterate. So with this current set up you have 2 GCDs out of 24 not utilized in a 40 sec span. As time progresses you can see how you will accumulate enough RP such that the even numbered rotations become FS-O-FS-O-FS-O. Another thing is that with some RNG luck you may get Rime to proc in the earlier rotations allowing HB to replace the first x in the even numbered rotations allowing for some extra damage as well as valuable RP. So the idea is once you build up enough RP momentum you alternate between a setup rotation and a big damage rotation.

Unfortunately I'm not in Beta so I wouldn't be able to test this build and see it in use; however, I'm wondering if anyone who is willing to give frost a shot could try it out and report some numbers. Considering you can spend every single GCD doing some sort of special attack, and every other 10 seconds you can spam 3 Obliterates and 3 frost strikes it seems like you can do some pretty respectable damage. To put things in perspective it would be like doing 4.5 mortal strikes within a 10 second span. The damage may seem low now with the current gear, but as has been the case throughout the history of WoW, melee dps seems to scale exceptionally well with newer weapons and stacking of melee stats. In addition, you can also see how in previous iterations FS as 100% WD + bonus would be extremely overpowered. The second rotation would be the equivalent of spamming mortal strikes for 10 seconds, half of which ignore armor. I would say if people want a return to the old big hitting FS you would have to attach a cooldown to it, because RP cost is not enough of a limiting factor to prevent it from being OP.

 

Scraps

I am interested in your discussion but I have a few questions.

1. With only 1 point in Epidemic, if your first rotation doesn't kill your target, your last Frost Strike and Obliterate in rotation two are hitting with no diseases up. Is this intentional?

2. Rotations 1+2 are the exact same as 3+4. Was this intended?

3. How are you net different amounts of RP between rotation 1 and 3, 2 and 4?

4. What are you doing with this theoretical extra RP anyway?

5. If your first rotation kills the target to provide 20 RP from Butchery, are you saying your second rotation, that doesn't apply any diseases, is on the next mob? I think this is your point, that you want to have a rotation that every other cycle doesn't even bother applying diseases, even though it is triple Obliterating.

6. Is this a raid DPS build or mob grinding build? IE are you expecting each mob to die per single rotation? If so, maintaining your RP might be a little inconsistent, although I don't think it kills your concept.

 

Ghraabthar

To answer your questions.

1. I meant this as a PVE type rotation, specifically when dpsing a boss. I realize that the diseases fall off with the last obliterate/FS. The alternative would be to take 1 point from dark conviction and have 2 points in Epidemic.

2. Yes the two rotations are identical, basically the idea is that the odd numbered rotations are the same, and the even numbered rotations you would ideally do FS-O-FS-O-FS-O if you had the RP saved up. I didn't go into a rotation 5 and 6 to save space.

3. Maybe Net isn't such a good term, basically what this is is how much RP you are left with at the end of each rotation. Basically you can expect to gain 50 RP from the setup rotation and expend 30 RP from the damage rotation, 70 RP if you end up using FS 3 times. So the RP you have at the end of 3-4 is higher because you have 20 RP saved up from 1-2 together.

4. The theoretical use of extra RP would be to put in a third FS into the damage cycle (even numbered cycle). If say you were able to start a fight with close to full RP I think it would be possible to have enough RP to 3 FSs in the damage cycle every time.

5. Again this is meant to be against a single target, basically squeezing out as much damage as possible by reapplying your diseases every 2 rotations. It seems that the reason that PS and IT hit for such low damage is to compensate for the fact that you are essentially applying a DOT with each attack.

6. Raid DPS, mob grinding is limited by having to reapply diseases which you may be able to avoid eventually if your attacks without the disease bonuses hit hard enough.

I think one of the endpoints of all this is that if we were to get say some set bonuses that allowed us to refresh diseases without having to use a delivery mechanism (PS or IT) then the potential for dps goes way up. Talents would also help in this regard. In an unholy build with the Scourge Strike Glyph which has a 25% chance to refresh both blood plague and Icy touch you could resort to SS spam as often as you could to maximize your dps. Again, this is all theoretical since I'm not in beta, but I think this is one of the better places to discuss these ideas.

 

Scraps

This is a fine place to discuss ideas, perhaps the best.

1. Using Obliterate with no diseases applied as you suggest will very likely not be worth more than the 1% crit from Dark Conviction. The bonus damage per disease is critical to making Obliterate a DPS relevant ability. You would certainly never plan a rotation to Obliterate with anything less than the optimal diseases applied. I don't even think you'll even want to do this on accident. I'm not a mathemagician so I haven't crunched any numbers since the last four patches of nerfs, but having played DK in beta since early August, to my knowledge it is never mathematically optimal to Obliterate an undebuffed mob in any rotation.

2. I just think this is a 2 cycle rotation, adding 3 and 4 just makes me do a double take because nothing is actually different.

3. I understand what you meant by net, you really meant "left over" from each rotation, which is fine. However I don't think your math adds up correctly because I think you have misunderstood how Butchery works. Please correct me if I missing something but I do not think your rotation is even possible.

You have assumed in your rotations that you are getting 20 RP bonus from every rotation. If this is a boss DPS rotation, you don't get bonus 20 RP because nothing is dying. You only get the bonus 20 RP when you kill something. Your math indicates you are getting 20 RP at the end of every cycle of your rotation.

You do, however, get 2 RP/5 seconds while in combat, which is not calculated in your rotation, and probably should be.

A. IT PS BS BS O FS (+1.0s) [34 RP] (30+10+10+10+10-40+4RP/10s)
B. (+1.5s) O FS O FS O FS [?]

Correct me if I am wrong but I don't believe this rotation is even possible as you won't have enough RP from your first cycle for your second Frost Strike in your second cycle.

I agree that any ability that extends the duration of your diseases significantly improves the DPS you can deal in a planned rotation by not having to use the low-DPS disease-applying abilities, which is why I was surprised this rotation Obliterates at the end of your second cycle, when no diseases are applied, yet would be applied if you had the second point in Epidemic.

 

Darkrenown

I wouldn't really call that snap aggro compared to a shield slam, but why would you IT, BB, BB anyway? It'll be less aggro than just putting up diseases and SSing. It's the same number of GCDs and only saves 1 rune. On the upside you can do it at range, sure, but on the downside how are you going to aggro the other mobs? You'd only have 1 Frost, 2 Unholy runes left so you can't D&D or pestilence untill your runes recharge.

Oh, seems my link to my build in my was post was broken, should be working now.

 

Ghraabthar

Yeah I misread the butchery talent and I was thinking you generate 2 RP per sec instead 2 RP per 5 seconds. In which case you end up gaining 16 less RP than what I have calculated per rotation. So end of the first rotation you have 34 RP left over, and you could only do at most 2 FS in the second rotation unless you get rime to proc and use the first GCD of the 2nd rotation as a HB.

So without HB your second rotation you start at 34 RP and end up with x-O-FS-O-O-x with 28 RP left over. With a Rime proc you could HB-O-FS-O-O-x with 52 RP left over. Now lets say you complete cycle 1 and 2 with no HB, you are left with 28 RP, and at the end of your next cycle 1 you go into cycle 2 with 62 RP instead. In that case you could FS-O-x-O-O-x with 56 RP left over. When you repeat the cycle again you will start cycle 2 with 90 RP next time around and ending up with a cycle FS-O-FS-O-O-x with 54 RP left over. Again, you could fill that x with a HB if you happen to have Rime up, or you can just wait it out. One thing to keep in mind is that with an 18 sec disease duration with 2 points in Epidemic your disease falls off right after the 5th GCD in the 2nd cycle. In that case you would want to leave that GCD blank because even if you had the RP to FS, you would lose 20% bonus damage with no FF up. If you did have some excess RP you could instead throw in a Runestrike if up, but without the 10% bonus damage from Tundra Stalker.

So to sum up the first rotation is always the same, and the 2nd rotation is where you have some variability to do either 1 or 2 FS. If you don't have the RP and have Rime up you would use HB for one of the unused GCDs. And the last GCD of the 2nd cycle you leave open except for Runestrike. What I would like to know is how long of a window you have to use Runestrike, and how long Rime stays up for the free HB.

Couple other points I want to throw out, using the Glyph of Obliterate which I'm proposing here the importance of having diseases up is minimized, with only 54 bonus damage per disease up. The other thing is that I remember some previous builds where Endless Winter would make it so FS applied FF. If you could somehow add that to the functionality of FS that would give you some more flexibility in speccing talents. You would be assured of having FF up all the time giving your FS 20% bonus damage from Glacier Rot and Tundra Stalker and ensuring you always have 10% bonus damage from Tundra Stalker. If that were the case I wonder if you could maybe not pick up Epidemic because essentially all you lose would be the 54 bonus damage on the Obliterates toward the end of the 2nd cycle when your Blood Fever falls off.

 

Lanlaorn

He was responding to your example where mobs are running around everywhere and you'd love to Challenging Shout.

Blood Boil has a 30 yard radius I believe, and only requires a disease on the mob you're targetting. So even if you're not in melee range of any of these mobs running wild, IT one and hit BB x2 and hopefully that's enough aggro to get them all to return to you.

 

• Chicken

Um, no it doesn't. Blood Boil does damage on targets that have a disease on them within a 30 yard range, it does not hit everything within 30 yard range as long as your target has a disease.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Zurai

No, I wasn't responding to the AOE taunt issue. Ghostcrawler already said several days ago that we'll be getting a baseline AOE taunt. I was responding to the single target initial aggro concern. The advantage to IT-BB-BB over IT-PS-SS is that, for one, two noncrit BBs do more damage than a single noncrit SS at least at current beta gear levels for deep Unholy. For two, you can get more aggro on the mob before it even reaches you, thanks to BB's range. For three, it is actually faster than IT-PS-SS, because you don't have to wait 2 seconds for the mob to get in range of you before you start attacking.

 

Darkrenown

That's odd. BB hits for 200-300 for me, SS hits for ~1200 for me. what kind of numbers are you seeing?

Where did you see we were getting an AoE taunt? I've just read though 7 pages of GC's posts and saw no mention of it, although I did notice:
which I haven't seen reported here yet. I wonder if we get .7 or .8 as an inate modifier?

 

Zurai

My Blood Boils hit for ~750 with a premade. It's got a ton of stacking modifiers for deep unholy - 15% black ice, 30% outbreak, 5% desecration, 2% bone shield, 14% ebon plague, 10% rage of rivendare. Like I said, you won't have desecrate or RoR on the pull, so that's a little less, but they should still hit for 650 to 700.

I'll see if I can find the AOE taunt quote. Maybe it was Koraa that posted it.

 

Darkrenown

Isn't desecration still bugged? Anyway I'm also deep unholy, which should be clear since I'm comparing it to Scourge Strike. The only thing you have which I don't is Outbreak, which adds 30% to BB. Since my SS is hitting for 4 times what BB does it still comes out far ahead. Also, everything you listed except Outbreak boosts SS just as much as it does BB. Maybe the last rank of BB gets a much bigger boost then SS does? I don't see why your BBs are hitting so hard compared to your SS.

 

grayrest

Is there any resource listing damage levels and coefficients of the various abilities? I know that they're heavily in flux, but the normalization of the talent point values has me looking into builds that take as many of the damage talents as possible. I believe that 30/0/41 has the most (and would therefore be the strongest build), but I'm unable to determine whether or not it's better than a deep blood/unholy build because I lack numbers and coefficients (for the diseases in particular) and can't seem to dig them up anywhere.

 

Septus

Whew, so I'm fairly overwhelmed by the involvement of Death Knight tanking. The rune system itself already requires a lot of management, let alone adding in blade barrier and runic power management(primarily for Unholy).

Frost seems like a more attractive tanking build for now, just to make things a bit less hectic, or possibly Blood, though I'm still hesitant about being the only tanking class where the player can use an ability(as opposed to the boss) that would incentivize or require the healer to change healing style, for vampiric blood.

 

Darkrenown

Is this what you wanted?
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Death Knight Spell Scaling

 

Raedix

The Blood tanking skill is clearly for off-tanking, where you may be counting on a single healer who just can't keep up, and is bombing heals as best they can... that should allow them to catch up. I don't really see how the Blood tanking skill would be useful for a main tank.

 

Hearteater

It might be reasonable to make Vampiric Blood increase your maximum health by some percent for it's duration, that way the extra healing you are receiving isn't as likely to get wasted on overhealing. However that does present an issue with possibly putting you into Execute range as well as unintentionally putting you out of Blood Gorged ranged. Unless of course it increases current hp at the same time, but then it might as well be Last Stand.

Or, just make it 20 seconds of "you heal 50% of the damage you deal" instead. That removes the dependence on a second player to make the talent work.

 

Lujaar

Like Raedix said, blood tanking seems to be about offtanking. A "tanking" blood spec isn't going to look that different from a DPS blood spec. The tanking talents in blood also boost your DPS - 3% stam and 6% strength, avoidance bonus sub-35% and 12 expertise. Picking up Blade Barrier and every single healing ability would take some shuffling, but getting every single healing talent doesn't seem like a big deal anyway. My impression is that blood tanking isn't for MTing raid bosses, it's to be able to perform well as an offtank when needed with minimal lost DPS.

The healing abilities seem like a relic of the old design where whenever you healed yourself you healed your party too. Rune Tap has its moments but I don't know where you'd find the points for full Improved Rune Tap. Mark of Blood especially I'd like to see replaced with something else. As a tank it's a drop in the bucket and you have other healing options anyway, and as DPS it'd be about as effective as a shadowpriest clicking off shadowform to throw a renew on the tank.

Vampiric Blood may be aimed more at arenas than at tanking, although who knows how pvp balance will play out at this point.