Don't see why it should work in any way differently to the Warrior Anger Management - Spell - World of Warcraft . Runic Power is practically Rage, afterall. Note that the warrior one is getting the "while in combat" removed with 3.0 so it'll practically be word-for-word.


As for Spells: It's theorized that blizz is moving towards making spell and melee crit/hit one and the same. Thus elliminating idiotic clashes like Enh Shamans missing 13% of their shocks, the clusterfuck with paladins a few months ago when half their spells were off hit and half off spell hit etcetera.

For Corpse Explosion: Excellent AoE additional utility. Gives you a little bit of AoE edge, without making the DK an AoE class (because someone has to create a corpse first). Can't be a bad thing when half your AoE is toast and you want to pitch in.

Yeah umm I started this thread and stuff. I'm aware of that. I'm talking about the talents that explicitly say what I said they say.

The assumption at this point in time would be that on equipment there is some crossover between spell crit and melee hit, or melee crit and spell crit, as there is a similar thing for AP and spell damage. Given this we might assume that talents that are +spell hit or +melee crit will provide a boost on top of this base value from equipment, but only apply to spell/melee, depending on the talent. Otherwise it makes no sense, and they would just use one value like they do on the equipment.

Given that assumption, and given that frost strike is considered a spell for crit purposes, is it also considered a spell for hit puropses, and +damage from talent puropses, or is it all worked out off melee values and then just does damage as a spell.

I think that's pretty obvious?

For example Frost Strike, it works as a spell. crit/hit/haste are one stat now (scale with both spell and melee), which comes mostly from gear. DK spell damage scales with AP.

Give talents that increase flat out spell damage or spell crit. That talent only increase abilities like death'n'decay and frost strike. But do not increase melee abilities like blood strike, there's different talents for them.

I could imagine spell damage gear to scale with DK abilities too. But I think it's scales worse than the melee gear we are meant to use (because most of our abilities are melee oriented after all), so there's no worry about that.

Apparently as it stands Virulence and Blood of Icewater don't add spell crit or hit to the character sheet. Why exactly is a good question, as normally straight +hit/crit talents will. Could be a bug, could be an oversight, could be something else.
To me it suggests that DK abilities aren't "spells" at all as the game understands them, rather they are abilities, so they may have melee base crit/hit rates much like warrior abilities.

It will be difficult to know until it can be properly tested. For Frost Strike, for example, I'd love to know the answers to what you asked, but without being in Alpha unless someone who is gets curious AND leaks it, I'll have to wait.

I would think your assumtion of spell or melee talents only affecting one or the other will be true. Stat consolidation on gear makes sense, but talents don't really.

It doesn't. Has been mentioned.

That would be pretty interesting, and probably long overdue in the realm of pve. Makes me wonder if a non-defined Haste stat would impact all classes GCD (besides rogues and cat druids). Though I suppose out of the melee classes that would matter most to Slam warriors.

I do believe you are incorrect. As opposed to all spells, Frost Strike requires melee weapon, and is also "on next melee" It could be compared to both Maul and Mangle, and in both cases its a melee ability that crits for 200% untalented.

The fact that it converts your attack to frost damage simply means that now you will hit much like Hydross' frost adds.

200% untalented, 250% talented Frost Strike is what I think is happening.

Speculative discussion has a place, but could we please keep such things speculative in tone. If you have an answer to a question someone else has posed please provide a relevant source. Passing off opinions as fact is just going to confuse discussion.

It would also be great if discussion of talent spec focused on the talents, and how the spec aims to use them. That way the discussion is not rendered pointless when the talents are changed around (unless the talents are also removed). The abilities and talents trees of the DK will change a lot more over the alpha/beta process, so "this is my build what do you think" kind of stuff isn't going to be as useful as "this is a build based around talent x, working like this, what do you think?".

Thanks.

Crazy on DK.info, who is in the alpha, has stated that it crits for 150% untalented. Yeah, he could be mistaken, but considering he's in the alpha I'm going to trust him over speculation and comparisons to other abilities.

When existing talents say 50% more damage on criticals that presently do 150%, it doesn't mean 200%, it means 175%.

Aye, the wording is 50% more from your bonus crit damage, not 50% more from your damage from crits.

I looked through the whole DK.Info Latest patch changes thread, and haven't found a single instance of Crazy stating that. Can you please provide a link to your quote?

Thanks

Oh, and also, thanks to Buanna for pointing that out - the 50% we all forgot - its either 150/175% or 200/250% Only extra crit damage is multiplied by 50%, not the whole hit.

Edited: ok, found this quote here DK.info Death Coil & Frost Strike theorycrafting where Crazy states that DC crits for 150%. nothing about Frost Strike.

Can't trust this wording at present. There are talents that work both ways: the Survival Hunter slaying talents, for example, increase total crit damage, not just the critical strike damage bonus. Eternal Flames is actually worded to behave as a total crit damage increase, while Burnout is worded to work like a critical strike damage bonus increase but is actually functioning (so we were told in the Mage thread, anyway) as a total crit damage increase (and only makes sense if it does work that way).

So it could work either way, really, and just have early, imprecise tooltip text. Which way makes more sense?

Assuming these are averages, that puts the napkin multipliers at 1.95 and 2.35 respectively. We can probably assume Blizzard isn't changing default multipliers for melee/spell attacks for DKs, and it's actually 2x and 2.5x for Frost Strike with/without Chill of the Grave, but this is a little inconclusive.

He actually stated that it crit for 100% with 5/5 Chill of the Grave, rather than crits for 100% normally. Although numbers he's posted since then pretty much prove that to be incorrect so...yeah.
"100% crit damage with 'Chill of the Grave' talent." was his original wording, but he was pretty obviously wrong by his own numbers.

edit: I didn't even read two fucking posts above mine. Sorry.

Any leaked info on how professions are gonna be handled?

Sure its easy enough to farm all the mats to power level blacksmithing to 350 the instant you create your deathknight, but leveling is gonna be annoying at all the mining/herb/skinning nodes you have to pass up because you started at 55 with 1 gathering skill.

I imagine you'll be able to spend some of the time saved not leveling to 55 to go level a gathering profession, if you so desired. Not trying to be a dick about it, but I highly doubt they are going to give you some npc or other mechanic to automatically level one/two professions to lv 60 equivalent ranks.

the whole issue is kinda off-topic I guess, but I like to think they put in a bit more effort than that - I don't see anything wrong with setting DK tradeskills to 275 (eg.) by default to reflect their starting level

why I think that would make more sense than "tough luck, you saved time by not having to level from scratch, now go level tradeskills from scratch instead" is when it comes to gathering skills. With some far-fetched logic one can claim that it shouldn't be a problem to powerlevel a crafting profession with the inflated economy new DKs will face, but it can't be their intention to have the deathknight players who want to do skinning, mining or herbalism to make a level 55 character just to go back to level 10-20 places (and so on) for hours just to get their crafting skills up to a level that allows them to gather nodes in the zones they're supposed to level in. This just in.

I wonder for quite a while now about one thing that kinda matters for deathknight raiding: Ive read that after they moved all the presece talents to the 8th tier they also changed improved blood presence so that it would give +15% dmg/healing for your group instead of +5% strength (which is next to nothing if you want a spot in the melee support group). Can anyone confirm this ?

Although I think its a bit too much (10% might be better), but compared to the goodies other classes get for group support (moonkin anyone?), its something that would at least justify to take a deathknight along,

That was fake. All the improved Presence talents are identical to their old forms, just deep in their respective trees now.

Ok; because my previous post was considered useless, I will try to make a "usefull one" this time. Same story, better wrapping:

I'm concerned with the support a deathknight will bring along in raid-situations. At the moment there are 3 choices for Raidsupport a deathknight has in my opinion:

1.) Go for blood and enhance your group with improved Blood Presence: +5% str.
2.) Go for frost and play as tank. Everyone in your group will have an additional 5% Health.
3.) Go for unholy and play with a lot of utility we are hardly able to measure at the moment in terrms of dps viability, and support every caster DD in your Raid with an additional 15% caster damage (NYI).

While I'm sure we wont be at the bottom of the damage meters I'm kind of concerned in which group we will end up. Each group is limitied to only 5 players. Our current setting is something like:

- Warrior(Off), Paladin(Ret.), Shaman(Enh.), 2x Rogue (basic setting about 90% of the time)
- Warrior(Off), Paladin(Ret.), Shaman(Enh.), Druid(Fer.), Rouge (happened about 6 times during all tbc)
- Warrior(Off), Shaman(Enh.), 2x Rogue, Druid(Fer.)
- Paladin(Ret.), Shaman(Enh.), 2x Rogue, Druid(Fer.) (only on special ocasions)

I think it looks like that in most raids.

In case of 1.): We will buff our group only +5% str which is next to nothing compared to other group buffs (eg. Battleshout, Leader of the Pac). Warriors and paladins would get quite alot of these 5% so they dont matter in this case. The problem are shamans due to their itemsisation will already have less profit of improved str scaling and rogues and druids, while they do scale with str, usually dont stack it to noticeable amounts. Its also said that blizzard is aiming for shamans and hunter to share the same gear (or make it more worthwhile for both of them) which would point towards more AP for shamans but of course we dont know much about that at the moment so its only speculative.

My concern is: Will it be worth to have a deathknight in one of these melee groups ?

While I dont think it will be hard to push the feral out of that group (no profit from WF-totem) they were not much of a problem to beginn with, though the group is missing 5% Crit and alot of healing now. Shamans are "hard coded" because of their insane support abilities, removing him were silly, same for warrior as they profit the most from our presence.
Whos next ? Ah yes, the retribution paladin, who will use the same weapon type (2H) as we do and furthermore they bring a 2% damage increase. Also we dont know what they will get in the future. But what we kniw is they use plate with str on it instead of AP as well and therefore they scale as much as warriors do.
That only lealves the rouges. We also dont know what their support will be in wotlk if there is even one but they tend to be the best damage dealers when it comes to agrosensitive encounters and in most other cases as well (compared to other melee classes).
So who will be thrown out of the support group? Its hard to measure at the moment because we dont know all the details yet, though I dont think it does look good for deathknights.

In case 2.): Well this one doesn't really matter, a tank in a tank group is the perfect place.

In case 3.): The usual problem. We dont know enough at the moment to make clear statements , though it looks like there is no group support (ebon plague works for the whole raid I guess) and therefore no reason to put us in the melee group over other damage dealers, except if we were to scale alot better than them.

I wonder what blizzard will do with this situation as I can see difficult times ahead for the deathknights and their raidviability. What else is there to justify a deathknight in your raid ?

- Magic damage tanking is the one always mentioned, but we dont know if these will really require a deathknight or if a warrior will just take 5% more damage and thus make nearly no difference (lets face is, every encounter is designed for warriors beeing able to tank them) as a tank.

- Will a "twisted 5 min cooldown ghoul battlerez" do the trick ? We know their abilities by know but we can hardly guess what their use in raids will be, we dont even know if they can withstand the aoe of boss encounters.

Utility that will require us to invest talent Points:
- Mark of Blood was nerfed and therefore lost alot of use in raidsituations. (Can only be applied on enemies if I remember correctly.)
- Hysteria is nice but will be used more like a private buff from time to time like avenging wrath. (Does anyone know if we can apply it on ourselves ?)
- Anti-Magic Zone looks nice for heavy AoE encounters though you will be forced to specc depp into unholy to reach it.