crimsonsentinel, the 20% max health self heal has a 30 second cooldown with three points in improved rune tap.
Also, the minimum time of bone shield is 4 * 3 seconds, assuming a three second internal cooldown, a glyphed bone shield for the fifth bone, and the first bone shield is consumed immediately after the shield is activated. Therefore, bone shield has a minimum "up-time" of 20%.
t = 0, bone shield activates (5 bones remain)
t = 0 + delta t, bone first bone is consumed (4 bones remain)
t = 3, bone consumed (3 bones remain)
t = 6, bone consumed (2 bones remain)
t = 9, bone consumed (1 bone remains)
t = 12 last bone is consumed.
Edit, to comment on crimsonsentinel's post below.
While I was not able to find the 2 second internal cooldown posted in the link you provided, I'll take your word. However, your calculation that bone shield is up for at least 1/6 of the time (10 seconds) is incorrect. This is because a bone can be taken away a short moment after the shield is cast. As such, boneshield has a minimum time of just over 8 seconds with a 2 second internal cooldown, and 5 bones (due to glyph).
This makes the minimum uptime of bone shield approximately 13.33%.
Part of the Horn of Winter change is because people would cast dnd outside encounters to bump up runic power, so I would assume that it only gives 15 RP now. We won't know for sure till the ptr hits, but I'm fairly sure that's how it will work. Plus now we can use HoW to get RP out of combat which is pretty cool since before refreshing it would decrease the amount of RP we had to dump at the end of each rotation phase.
Frost:
-3% avoidance
-25% armor, 10% parry on cooldown (up 1/3 of the time)
-6 seconds longer IBF duration (allows IBF to be up 1/3 of the time)
-5 expertise
-Acclimation, which works out to be 150 resistance if the stack can be kept up (unreliable on non-sapphiron type fights)
If you are counting Acclimation then I would include Frost Aura's 80, as well.
I'm very eager to see the updated glyphs, considering the comment that in many cases negative effects were removed. The list of glyphs that could possibly include is Anti-Magic Shell, Blood Boil, Death Grip, Icy Touch, Obliterate, Rune Strike and Unbreakable Armor. Any of those glyphs that are losing the negative component become a bit more attractive, but especially Icy Touch or, god help us, Obliterate. That one glyph would become so much of a no brainer for frost and blood specs that something tells me it's going to keep it's negative component. We can dream though.
What do people think about the change to Heart Strike? Personally, I don't like it because I can't see a real need for it. How does it help?
If I'm AOEing with intent to deal damage or tank, here's how it works, regardless of spec:
Death and Decay, pick a target, PS, IT and Pestilence it. Wait on rune cooldowns. Blow Unholy/Frost Runes on something (Howling Blast, Scourge Strike, Obliterate). Blood Boil twice. Blow Runic Power on something (Death Coil, Frost Strike, Unholy Blight). DnD comes off cooldown, repeat.
The only time I would use a cleaving Heart Strike to AOE is to replace those 2 Blood Boils. But, what good does that do? I'm replacing one ability with another and that's supposed to help Blood keep up with the other two? On a small number of targets, I can see it being BETTER than Blood Boil, but how necessary is it? I've certainly never had trouble maintaining aggro in a heroic. If anywhere I've had a TON of trouble getting the attention of Lava Spawns and Whelps in 2-drake Sartharion. Turning on Unholy Blight and standing in the spawn spot is just too damn good at pissing off so many mobs and getting snap aggro. A 2-target Heart Strike does nothing for me.
I would have really preferred they made a significant change to Blood Boil, rather than throwing on an unnecessary Cleave. Something like
1) Blood Boil deals X damage to everything in 30 yards and additional damage to diseased targets - I could see that being a really powerful tool at generating quick snap aggro for all specs.
2) A talent in Blood (Bloody Strikes) greatly increasing the damage of Blood Boil to better assist Blood in generating AoE damage and threat - business as usual, except now Blood is dealing equivalent damage to the other specs using the same rotation above.
There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.
It does give blood a kind of niche where they are better at tanking 2 and exactly 2 mobs. Obviously whether this will be useful or not depends on instance design. I don't think blizzard wants to make blood exactly as good on aoe as unholy or even frost; they just want blood to not suck completely.
I don't think frost aura is worth using because like mentioned before, it's only a couple resistance more than mark of the wild.
Strictly from a DPS perspective, I love the Heart Strike change. We're not currently seeing content that requires any CC, but we've got lots of pulls that have 5, 8 or 10+ monsters, both in naxx and elsewhere. A cleaving Heart Strike just doubled the damage I'm getting out of my blood runes, and made it clearly superior in multi-target situations to use Heart Strikes via death runes rather than Oblits. It's a sizable increase in my ability to contribute to multi-pulls.
edit: To clarify, yes Blood Boil hits everything in range with the same rune already, but it does far less effective damage. I can squeeze 4 to 5k out of Blood Boil on pulls before Faerilina, for example, but significantly less on the 4 packs ahead of Sartharion. Cleaving Heart Strike will guaruntee me at least 3-4k on every Blood rune, much more on crits, and also increase our damage on the main target. Kill the primary faster, soak less raid damage. I'd take 5k on 2 targets ahead of 5k on 10 any day of the week.
If they're going to make corpse explosion good and tack on ghoul AoE avoidance to Night of the Dead, I hope they also look at the number of must-have talents in deep unholy. Going full unholy is already 53 points minimum because of Ebon Plaguebringer, Scourge Strike, and Wandering Plague all occupying the same tier. Adding 2/2 Night of the Dead that deep in the tree pushes it to 55. Wanting to cut down on unholy bloat was something GC mentioned in beta, but this change makes it a lot more needed.
The most obvious option is cutting the Crypt Fever talent. If they can make Ebon Plague stack for personal disease count, there's no reason to have an option to take just Crypt Fever. Alternatively they could cut down the cost of one of the weaker talents earlier in the tree - say, Necrosis as a 3-point talent, for 4/7/10% autoattack damage.
"What the poet laments holds for the mathematician. That he writes his works with the blood of his heart."
– Ludwig Boltzmann
The thing about this change is you'll have both. Fighting 10 things, continue using Blood Boil. Fighting 4 things, use Heart Strike.
Which is why I don't think the change is necessary. They could just un-suck the hell out of Blood Boil, make it even better for Blood and you just killed 2 birds with one stone.
There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.
Which is why I don't think the change is necessary. They could just un-suck the hell out of Blood Boil, make it even better for Blood and you just killed 2 birds with one stone.
They had to buff Heart Strike tho. Stop whining anyways, no matter how you slice it, its a buff to Heart Strike since the previous debuff was worthless, at least now we will keep doing the same amount of damage and do quite a bit more if there are 2 things to hit. Stop looking at this from a tanking standpoint too, HS is used for PVP and DPS too.
If they're going to make corpse explosion good and tack on ghoul AoE avoidance to Night of the Dead, I hope they also look at the number of must-have talents in deep unholy. Going full unholy is already 53 points minimum because of Ebon Plaguebringer, Scourge Strike, and Wandering Plague all occupying the same tier. Adding 2/2 Night of the Dead that deep in the tree pushes it to 55. Wanting to cut down on unholy bloat was something GC mentioned in beta, but this change makes it a lot more needed.
The most obvious option is cutting down the cost of one of the weaker talents earlier in the tree - say, Necrosis as a 3-point talent, for 4/7/10% autoattack damage, or Desecration for 3 points at a 33/66/100% proc rate. Alternatively they could just cut the 3 points in Crypt Fever, because if they can make Ebon Plague stack for personal disease count there's no reason to have the option to take just crypt fever.
Most Unholy builds (including my own) I've looked at recently already have 2/2 NotD. The only exception I know of are people taking Desecration. If you cared about having a pet up regularly, you were already taking it. With the change, it makes an already strong talent stronger.
Edit: ah yes, I forgot about builds that max Outbreak and Dirge and then put 1 point in. On the plus side, they made Outbreak much less attractive by removing pestilence. Given that I'll be using my Blood runes on Pestilence in any AE situation now, the buff to Blood Boil and Plague Strike would have to be ridiculous for me to spend points in the talent now.
There had been some discussion in the Blood thread about dropping Death Rune Mastery because we were using OBs instead of HSs whenever we could. Now those Death Runes will become very useful in AoE situations. I'd rather spam HS repeatedly and hit 2 targets than hit 1 target with a slightly bigger OB.
As for the Unholy bloat, that "bloat" is all useful talents... most people drop Desecration, I wouldn't consider it a must-get. There's plenty of useful alternatives. Most people got NotD anyway. Taking a look at the other two trees, you'll see far less useful bloat (middle section of Frost and bottom section of Blood). I'd rather have a choice of somewhat useful talents than having to choose between two talents that only situationally increase my dps.
I'm sad to not see any gargoyle changes. With a pathetic 13k hp, they die super easily on any AOE fight...making it a situational ability even though it does such massive damage.
They might address the Garg survivability with a glyph. As a 50/0/21, I'd trade the ghoul glyph over it in a heartbeat. I guess the problem lies in it being a 21 point talent... It has to have some kind of a liability for it not to outperform DRW completely with the DPS being superior (*). Although extending Night of the Dead to the Gargoyle would solve the problem for Unholy ones... regardless, it's an issue.
They had to buff Heart Strike tho. Stop whining anyways, no matter how you slice it, its a buff to Heart Strike since the previous debuff was worthless, at least now we will keep doing the same amount of damage and do quite a bit more if there are 2 things to hit. Stop looking at this from a tanking standpoint too, HS is used for PVP and DPS too.
Have I stepped into another realm of reality where every boss fight consists of two things to DPS down 5 feet away from each other? At the end of the day, that's all this change is truly going to help with. Who the hell cares about trash? And even on an AOE boss fight, your damage isn't going to skyrocket because you're REPLACING Blood Boil with Heart Strike, not adding it on top of what you're already doing.
PvP sure, great. You can pump out a whole bunch of damage in the middle of the melee clusterfuck. I get that and think its neat.
That doesn't change the fact that once the patch comes out Blood AOE threat STILL pales in comparison to the other two specs and Blood Boil is still incredibly weak.
There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.
If you cap def you will not need to use that glyph, i still want 4% parry. I want to see the new sigils
There's some math done assuming that IBF will scale in a linear fashion the same as it does from 400 to 540, and if it does, the new forge will provide roughly 3% mitigation through IBF if its used all the time, moreso if you have the Frost talent, and 4pc tier 7.
If it indeed scales the same, it'll almost be a no brainer, with 2% more hp.
Then again, Blizzard doesn't want to pigeon hole people into one forge exclusively.
Appreciated, Blood Boil does still seem lacking, but that's not what they're buffing nor is it really the point of what we're discussing. I agree with you, Blood Boil needs to be buffed. It was too good in beta when it was more useful than Blood Strike, but the current damage is too low. However, that's not what they're giving us. What they've chosen to do is keep Blood Boil for its current niche (5+ mobs or big packs of low hp crap), and turn Heart Strike into a passive aoe ability that we're already somewhat spamming anyway. I can think of situations even on bosses where it will come in handy (Faerlina frenzy, sartharion, etc).
Could they have just added a "Glyph of Heart Strike" that was identical to Glyph of Maul for druids and left the ability alone? Sure, but I have faith that there's a reason they chose not to do that. Honestly, the haste neutralizing part of Heart Strike barely made a difference, and I won't miss it. I'm sure glad to keep one of my glyph slots for other stuff, though.
There's some math done assuming that IBF will scale in a linear fashion the same as it does from 400 to 540, and if it does, the new forge will provide roughly 3% mitigation through IBF if its used all the time, moreso if you have the Frost talent, and 4pc tier 7.
If it indeed scales the same, it'll almost be a no brainer, with 2% more hp.
Then again, Blizzard doesn't want to pigeon hole people into one forge exclusively.
It's not a no-brainer. 4% parry scales massively well with higher avoidance. If you have 60% avoidance without a rune enchant, +4% parry decreases incoming damage by 10%. If you have 80% avoidance without a rune enchant, +4% parry decreases incoming damage by 20%. Also, given that dodge/parry from Defense skill is subject to diminishing returns (I presume), while a straight-up 4% parry bonus is not, you won't get nearly as much avoidance from Gargoyle at 620def as you will at 520def.
Remember, though, some tanks are obsessed with EH, and some encounters are biased towards higher EH... so in that case, the 2% stamina weapon might win out. You could envision a situation where you keep the Gargoyle on a 2hander with loads of STA, and Swordshattering on a 2hander with loads of STR/AGI, for different situations.
Have I stepped into another realm of reality where every boss fight consists of two things to DPS down 5 feet away from each other? At the end of the day, that's all this change is truly going to help with. Who the hell cares about trash? And even on an AOE boss fight, your damage isn't going to skyrocket because you're REPLACING Blood Boil with Heart Strike, not adding it on top of what you're already doing.
PvP sure, great. You can pump out a whole bunch of damage in the middle of the melee clusterfuck. I get that and think its neat.
That doesn't change the fact that once the patch comes out Blood AOE threat STILL pales in comparison to the other two specs and Blood Boil is still incredibly weak.
I don't know what world you're from, but this is a buff regardless since the previous debuff did nothing in terms of improving DPS.
12/10/08, 5:18 PM
