WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities. - Page 85

Zurai · 09/27/08, 11:02 PM

Originally Posted by Ultimate

On live my warriors shield makes up less than 40% of his total armor rating.

You're falling victim to a common misconception. If your warrior's shield is 40% of his current total armor, then ADDING the shield increased his armor by 66%. Simple proof:

Our example warrior has 1,000 total armor, 40% of which comes from his shield. That's 400 armor on the shield. That leaves 600 armor from the rest of his gear. Adding the 400 to the 600 increases the 600 by 66.667% (400/600). A Death Knight with the same armor base would gain 45% by switching to Frost Presence, leaving him at 870 armor. That's 13% lower than the Warrior's armor.

Ultimate · 09/28/08, 1:08 AM

Yeah your right. Not sure how i was looking at it before, because I'm not even coming up with the same numbers anymore. I was looking at total numbers not base before shield or presence. So the percent of dk armor increase is always gonna be 45%. Warrior is gonna fluctuate depending on gear selection. Right now on live my shield makes up almost 50% of my base armor. 13005 base (6459 shield). If i had a lower quality shield like aldori legacy protector then it would be lower, but the point was made.

Kaejin · 09/28/08, 1:35 AM

Would changing Frost Presence to allow you to block with your weapon while it's active throw things totaly out of wack this far into development?

There are plenty of mobs that can block without a shield (at least the last time I checked). It would stop block rating from being completely useless for DKs, and increase the value of defense rating as well. 2-handed weapons are pretty big anyway, so I don't think blocking with one would be that absurd. The only drawbacks (which are still improvements from not benefiting from blocking at all) is that DK's wouldn't have the initial block value and armor that shields provide. It would pretty much be entirely up to the block value added by strength and the armor bonus from Frost Presence.

The only thing missing after that would be a snap aggro ability, and a damage reduction passive (Def stance, Imp Righteous Fury, etc). At least, if I'm understanding the conversations here correctly.

Mild Confusion · 09/28/08, 1:49 AM

Is the toughness talent not stacking with frost presence a bug? It seems like one to me. At least it seems against the spirit of the talent and I have a hard time believing it's working as intended.

How does it add up totally anyhow?

Zurai · 09/28/08, 2:45 AM

Originally Posted by Mild Confusion

Is the toughness talent not stacking with frost presence a bug? It seems like one to me. At least it seems against the spirit of the talent and I have a hard time believing it's working as intended.

How does it add up totally anyhow?

I dunno who said they don't stack, but they were wrong. I just tested it. My premade's armor is 12966 without FP or Toughness and 21465 with both. 12966 * 1.45 * 1.15 = 21620; 12966 * 1.6 = 20745. The actual result is much closer to the expected multiplicative stacking target number; there's a minor difference (155, less than 1%) there that's probably the result of rounding errors. It's over 700 (3%) off the additive stacking target.

Clandestine · 09/28/08, 4:16 AM

Perhaps I was unclear, but I wasn't saying they don't stack, I was saying that even though Toughness for Death Knights is 15% as opposed to Warrior's 10% Toughness, it is not strictly superior - they are designed to have the same relative effect on both classes.

Reliknom · 09/28/08, 7:08 AM

Just a quick question: has there been any tests run for dancing rune weapon and threat? I.E. do you gain threat from the damage your dancing rune weapon does and if yes, how is it calculated - do presences and other possible modifiers apply?

E: Might add gargoyle to the question as well.

Darkrenown · 09/28/08, 10:38 AM

Also, does exploding your ghoul as Unholy count as your threat? If so it'd be a decent AoE threat bomb, but it probably doesn't.

Bladed armour seems to be getting a nerf soon:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming Protection changes

NOTE: These changes were in the works before the recent round of dps discussions. I hope to have some Arms and Fury changes to report soon.

Armored to the Teeth -- Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn't want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It's still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.

EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.

It seems like this'll hit tanking DKs a fair bit harder than a prot warrior. Assuming 20k armour on both and ignoring any Str increasing talents a warrior will lose 150 Str or 75 Block value from this change while a DK will lose 250 Str/1.2% parry, which is a non-trivial loss of avoidece from a change which is seemly to prevent Shield Slam scaling too well.

gorsameth · 09/28/08, 11:35 AM

Originally Posted by Darkrenown

Also, does exploding your ghoul as Unholy count as your threat? If so it'd be a decent AoE threat bomb, but it probably doesn't.

You cant explode your ghoul anymore even with Master of ghouls. Only if you die and ress with Shadow of Death can you explode yourself

Darkrenown · 09/28/08, 11:45 AM

Originally Posted by gorsameth

You cant explode your ghoul anymore even with Master of ghouls. Only if you die and ress with Shadow of Death can you explode yourself

Are you sure? Unless it's changed in the most recent patch you can target your ghoul and use corpse explosion which makes it use it's explode ability. I've been Frost for the last 3 patchs though, so I could have missed this being removed, but I haven't seen anyone mention it.

Edit: Just specced Unholy and tried it, it still works fine, hits for about 2.5k.

• vank · 09/28/08, 12:18 PM

I've been using the mod Rune Watcher and I've noticed something that seems a bit odd. I've always been under the impression that the cooldown on runes is 10 seconds. However, while I was practicing on a Target Dummy, I noticed that the rune cooldowns varied from 10 seconds to as low as 8 seconds. Is there something I'm missing, or is it most likely a bug with the mod. The runes with the indicated 8 second cooldown seem to be available after those 8 seconds expire, so maybe I'm not aware of the overall rune cooldown mechanic. Any insight?

Flamingcloud · 09/28/08, 12:41 PM

Originally Posted by Darkrenown

Bladed armour seems to be getting a nerf soon:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming Protection changes

He only mentions the warrior talent I very much doubt bladed armor will be changed.

Darkrenown · 09/28/08, 12:51 PM

Originally Posted by Flamingcloud

He only mentions the warrior talent I very much doubt bladed armor will be changed.

Seems you missed the bolded part?

Armored to the Teeth -- Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn't want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It's still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.

Mild Confusion · 09/28/08, 2:01 PM

That's a shame, it was a nice chunk of parry.

Clandestine · 09/28/08, 5:59 PM

Originally Posted by Mild Confusion

That's a shame, it was a nice chunk of parry.

At 45000 armor, which I believe is the armor cap in WotLK, you would gain 140 parry rating from the strength that Bladed Armor would give you. This is at most 2.8% parry discounting diminishing returns on avoidance. At a more reasonable 23000 armor, it gave 71 parry rating, or about 1.5% parry. It was hardly significant and I imagine the change affects Death Knights as well mostly for ease of coding and to prevent people crying about unfair treatment. By which I mean, it was a nice little perk, but it was hardly a talent which DK tanks were specifically going to spec into for mitigation, as it seems was the case for Warriors.

Mild Confusion · 09/28/08, 9:20 PM

I misspoke, I meant to say that it's just the loss of something extra. I didn't mean for it to sound like a big deal.

Ish · 09/29/08, 9:17 AM

Regarding glyphs, do the Bloodstrike glyph apply to Heartstrike as well? if not then hopefully an oversight by the devs like the current situation where bloodstrike is doing more damage than heartstrike.

Otherwise we will have a redundant talent which was meant to be the main attack for Blood

Zurai · 09/29/08, 12:10 PM

Originally Posted by Ish

Regarding glyphs, do the Bloodstrike glyph apply to Heartstrike as well?

Yes. Too bad the Obliterate glyph didn't get the same treatment with Scourge Strike.

Xelopheris · 09/29/08, 4:27 PM

Originally Posted by Zurai

I dunno who said they don't stack, but they were wrong. I just tested it. My premade's armor is 12966 without FP or Toughness and 21465 with both. 12966 * 1.45 * 1.15 = 21620; 12966 * 1.6 = 20745. The actual result is much closer to the expected multiplicative stacking target number; there's a minor difference (155, less than 1%) there that's probably the result of rounding errors. It's over 700 (3%) off the additive stacking target.

Remember that Frost Presence and Toughness only affect armor from items, not agility.

Take the agility-armor out of the equation and you should be able to get the value perfectly. Just from reversing your math around, 21465 / 1.6 = 13415 -- meaning 450 armor from agi, or 225 agi. Seems about right :/ looks like they're additive.

Zurai · 09/29/08, 5:39 PM

Originally Posted by Xelopheris

Remember that Frost Presence and Toughness only affect armor from items, not agility.

Take the agility-armor out of the equation and you should be able to get the value perfectly. Just from reversing your math around, 21465 / 1.6 = 13415 -- meaning 450 armor from agi, or 225 agi. Seems about right :/ looks like they're additive.

Good point about the agi armor, but DKs have nowhere near 225 agi. The premade in question has 117, which removes 234 armor from the equation. That puts us at 12732 armor from items. The expected multiplicative stacking number is thus 21464.61 - which, rounded up, is exactly what we got.

EDIT: The expected additive total would be 20605, which is even farther off the actual.

tzenes · 09/29/08, 10:17 PM

As always the latest Spread Sheets:
RapidShare: Easy Filehosting
and xls
RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

I've fixed a number of minor bugs so far.

The biggest push this version is to include a larger number of Enchants, Gems, and Items mostly from 5mans and Heroic 5mans.

Thanks to everyone who helped point out the bugs.

Mild Confusion · 09/30/08, 1:06 AM

Some upcoming DK changes from GC.

We have been doing some more tests on DK tanking, this time especially on raid bosses. We think the DK design has some limitations, which weren't showing up as much on tanking 5-player dungeons.

Specifically, as many people suspected, the death knight really suffers when attacks fail to land, especially opening attacks. Having a Plague Strike dodged or parried can throw off an entire rotation, eventually leading to bad Obliterates because both diseases weren't up at the same time. Missing attacks is a fact of life for all tanks since it's hard to stack +hit and +expertise along with mitigation stats. However, existing tank classes have mechanics to let them "burn off rage" (or mana) to make up for those bad strings. The DK plays more like a rogue who can't get enough combo points in play. This had a deadly effect on DK threat generation, which just didn't compete with that of other tanks.

We didn't want to just solve this with more free expertise because A) that has major PvP ramifications, and B) the death knights would start to hate expertise on their gear.

Instead we are making some fairly big changes:

1) Blade Barrier now procs when your Blood Runes are inactive. While the initial implementation of this ability was fun, as we added Death Rune mechanics it became harder to use, and the fast recharge on missed attacks made it even harder. Now it should be up almost all the time.

2) We also found a bug where a naked, untalented death knight only had 2.5% dodge instead of 5% like warriors and paladins. With these two avoidance changes, death knight survivability should be very close to the other tanks, recognizing that avoidance is more dangerous than mitigation for a tank. As an aside, death knights, warriors and paladins currently mitigate a similar amount of damage, and druids may very well be mitigating too much.

3) Frost Strike can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried. Frost death knights were losing too much potential damage and threat when Frost Strike failed to connect, putting Frost tanks in the awkward position of wanting to skip Frost Strike and just use Death Coil.

4) We changed Rune Strike completely. It is now mostly a tanking ability meant to dish out high damage (and therefore threat). Rune Strike can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack. It affects the next swing, so it doesn't compete with global cooldowns and can be spammed to some extent. It hits for 200% weapon damage (remember 100% of that is the white swing you lost) plus a percentage of AP. It cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, and costs 10 runic power (for now). Think Heroic Overrevenge.

5) I think we already announced these changes, but just to get them all in one place: Bladed Armor went back to attack power. It was changed only to match the warrior talent, which we changed back. Death and Decay got a decent threat boost to get it closer to the realm of Consecration and the new Thunder Clap.

AWESOME SUFFICIENTLY LARGE TWEAKS

I did notice the dodge base being lower before, but never made it out to be a bug, so that's a nice change, hard to argue with 2.5% more dodge.

Rune Strike is interesting, still, I find it funny that it can still be macrod and forgotten.

And the blade barrier change is very nice indeed.

Clandestine · 09/30/08, 1:50 AM

It is very nice that Rune Strike *finally* has a clear purpose. The other changes are appropriate tweaks.

Janraea · 09/30/08, 2:06 AM

Originally Posted by Mild Confusion

Some upcoming DK changes from GC.
I did notice the dodge base being lower before, but never made it out to be a bug, so that's a nice change, hard to argue with 2.5% more dodge.
Rune Strike is interesting, still, I find it funny that it can still be macrod and forgotten.
And the blade barrier change is very nice indeed.

I'd expect a price increase on rune strike - 10 rp per 2h swing is cheap enough that GC's old logic of "it won't be macro'd like Kill Command because the price isn't insignificant" might not hold. (Though I'll never macro it - I like to have something to hit between gcds..). Also a solid soloing buff.

Edit: I suppose that it's not actually any cheaper than it was when she said that.. What I really mean is that it seems strong enough for cheap enough that that statement may no longer seem true - it isn't just double damage for one hit, it's double damage that can't be avoided.

The change to blade barrier is all we've been praying for - it should never be down for a competent tank, even a pair of blood strike misses in a row leave enough time for the proc.

Lanlaorn · 09/30/08, 2:26 AM

In the beta what's the best DK tank spec? From the math I'm looking at a Frost spec has a serious edge in survivability while Unholy is better at TPS, especially AoE, and I'd love to know what's true in practice. Also, has anyone tried to maintain a decent TPS while dual wielding two tanking weapons (to not miss out on the stats of a tanking MH + shield)?

Argh, curse my luck! How did I get 2 beta invites for TBC but zero for WotLK. I'm intrigued by Death Knight tanking but completely reliant on spreadsheets to test my ideas. Ah well, thanks in advance for any answers