As for the concept of buffing the disease portions of of PS and IT so they become desirable, I feel that this is likely to still make them feel like a burden: you put them up because you have to, not because you want to. Even if the disease damage is amazing, a Plague strike that hits for 700 just isn't satisfying. The inferior damage options of other classes do decent damage themselves (think Scorch, Heamo), PS would almost be nicer if it was soley the dot: remove the damage portion altogether and be done with it, so we can think of it as a good dot, rather than a very mediocre strike.
Why not think of it as a DoT with an initial bonus tick then? There's existing examples; Flame Shock, Moonfire, Immolate, to name a few.
Maybe I'm just not understanding why PS and IT need to do high initial damage to be "satisfying", but then again I was playing a Shadow Priest for most of BC. /shrug
This is not true. Scaling percentage based weapon damage increases from diseases were never implemented, only hinted at due to concerns over the "Lazy Blood" playstyle. The period of time where Scourge Strike 'spiraled out of control' was when Outbreak and Black Ice (which used to affect Shadow damage as well) all multiplicatively affected Scourge Strike. It's not like scaling percentage based weapon damage increases is a tried and discarded solution.
You might have joined the beta after the first wave of nerfs, but for awhile we did have scalar disease bonuses. I want to say Blood Strike was 60% weapon damage + 2.5% per disease, Oblit was 100% weapon damage + 4% per disease, but someone else might remember it better.
Also... good god, Scourge Strike was overpowered back then. 100% weapon damage + 15% from Black Ice + 16% or whatever from four diseases + Outbreak + some other ridiculousness I've probably forgotten. I do agree that there were so many other problems that it's hard to say scalar disease bonuses made SS or anything else overpowered.
RE: "Plague Strike should hit for 60% weapon damage," that's exactly what it hit for back in those days. Plague Strike got nerfed because of concerns about IT+PS eclipsing FU abilities. That'd be even more true now. (Back then Black Ice was 15% frost, Outbreak was only 30%, and the IT and PS glyphs didn't exist.)
Why not think of it as a DoT with an initial bonus tick then? There's existing examples; Flame Shock, Moonfire, Immolate, to name a few.
Maybe I'm just not understanding why PS and IT need to do high initial damage to be "satisfying", but then again I was playing a Shadow Priest for most of BC. /shrug
You raise a fair point there. On further consideration, I might say it has to do with the resource required. The abilities you list all cost mana: using them doesn't lock you out of your "good" abilities for any longer than a GCD, and they don't really require threading into a complex rotation, you put them up when the dot runs out, and that is that.
It might have been a bit of both-- I thought I remembered the melee strikes being changed to flat damage bonuses in a particular beta build, or they might just have been correcting misleading tooltips, now that I think of it. For example, I found these old notes that give an example of the way Scourge Strike used to be worded:
Scourge Strike (Tier 9) changed to: An unholy strike that deals 100% of weapon damage as Shadow damage plus 333 and 50% additional damage for each of the Death Knight’s diseases on the target.
Yeah, it hit pretty damn hard.
In any case, it seems like they should be able to implement a more reasonable scaling factor for disease damage. Buffing PS should go a long way toward making diseases more desirable though.
If the concern over making PS good is that it'll be so good that people will spam IT and PS instead of using FU abilities, would it be unreasonable to make it apply a non-disease DoT in addition to Blood Plague? Currently the NPCs in-game that use Plague Strike apply one that does a shadow damage DoT for a few seconds, so perhaps something like that.
With the interest of not harming DK tanking initial threat, PS could do a good chunk of it's total damage on the strike, then over the next 6 seconds or so it could apply a DoT that does progressively less damage, like a backwards Curse of Agony, or make it do damage at a slower rate as time goes on, like a reversed Wild Growth. That way if you spam it you lose damage.
There are ways to make PS do more damage without making it something you would spam along with IT because they do better damage than Oblit or SS.
Why not think of it as a DoT with an initial bonus tick then? There's existing examples; Flame Shock, Moonfire, Immolate, to name a few.
Maybe I'm just not understanding why PS and IT need to do high initial damage to be "satisfying", but then again I was playing a Shadow Priest for most of BC. /shrug
But PS does not hit as hard as IT. It's less of a concern about the inital damage but more of a concern about the total damage. Maybe part of that comes from how easy it is to boost IT damage, but PS still feels lackluster in any build. To be honest it comes back to my original point about the lack of options available. If in order to be an effective DK you have to keep both your diseases up that takes out two of your runes, you then have either BS or BB (or happily HS if you are so specced) to convert your Blood Runes to Death Runes which leaves you with 1 Frost and 1 Unholy Rune free on a 10s cooldown. If there is an ability you 'have' to use then you want it to feel worthwhile, at the moment PS is not doing that.
Of course with the change to the Frost tree come 3.1 it will probably re-arrange things so it is not so easy to boost IT damage and PS will feel more on-par with IT in most builds.
What about playing with the desecration talent and getting that 5% dps increase to apply not only when u stand in that zone but also on the go as well. That will make u want to use PS forsure
Ofcourse downing it to 3% or whatever can be acceptable. By the way u can even bump it to uper tiers of the unholy tree so it can be reachable by blood and frost?
What about playing with the desecration talent and getting that 5% dps increase to apply not only when u stand in that zone but also on the go as well. That will make u want to use PS forsure
Ofcourse downing it to 3% or whatever can be acceptable. By the way u can even bump it to uper tiers of the unholy tree so it can be reachable by blood and frost?
Re-using an existing effect would probably be more desirable than introducing a new effect. It also would bring back some of the WCIII flavor of DKs carrying around a blight patch with them that they can throw down for bonus damage or some sort of regeneration; I don't see any reason for deep UH to have a monopoly on that. I especially don't see any reason for a nice flavor talent like that to be almost universally passed over as it is now. Putting an AoE snare low in any tree is a PvP concern, but that could be either stripped, glyphed, or an 'Improved' talent deeper in the tree.
I think the 'mobility' complaint about the current desecration would be far less prevalent if it weren't such a heavy investment. 5 points in an already-crowded portion of the UH tree feels expensive, so you expect a lot for your investment. 3 Points in a more flexible portion of the tree might not be so discouraging. Excepting fights like Grob and Heigan desecration uptime is decent, it's just not good enough to justify the investment. It might be worthwhile to make the patch centered on the player rather than the target since monster hit-boxes have grown to gargantuan proportions, and it's very rare you stand under the monster's crotch to actually benefit from the current patch. This should have little effect on PvP utility since player hitboxes are small, so if you're in melee range you're in range for the patch to snare.
I like the idea. Like your fat grandmas long skirt of which she needs to pull up with her two hands walk to a certain point then drops it off as soon as she reaches there
Re-using an existing effect would probably be more desirable than introducing a new effect. It also would bring back some of the WCIII flavor of DKs carrying around a blight patch with them that they can throw down for bonus damage or some sort of regeneration; I don't see any reason for deep UH to have a monopoly on that. I especially don't see any reason for a nice flavor talent like that to be almost universally passed over as it is now. Putting an AoE snare low in any tree is a PvP concern, but that could be either stripped, glyphed, or an 'Improved' talent deeper in the tree.
I think the 'mobility' complaint about the current desecration would be far less prevalent if it weren't such a heavy investment. 5 points in an already-crowded portion of the UH tree feels expensive, so you expect a lot for your investment. 3 Points in a more flexible portion of the tree might not be so discouraging. Excepting fights like Grob and Heigan desecration uptime is decent, it's just not good enough to justify the investment. It might be worthwhile to make the patch centered on the player rather than the target since monster hit-boxes have grown to gargantuan proportions, and it's very rare you stand under the monster's crotch to actually benefit from the current patch. This should have little effect on PvP utility since player hitboxes are small, so if you're in melee range you're in range for the patch to snare.
I think you're misunderstanding the way desecrated ground is dropped. When you cast PS, the desecrated ground circle is centered on the player, not the mob, since as you suggest it'd be pretty useless on a fight like Sapphiron if it centered on the mob.
I do agree that the talent "feels" expensive, and of course it's pretty lackluster for any build with epidemic. Of course, the fact remains that it is a powerful dps increase for any build that uses blood plague and doesn't have epidemic (though I think the only builds that fit this bill are 32/39 and x/20-x/51 dual-wield), having effectively 100% uptime since you will PS every 10 seconds.
Having the patch move with you would have some pretty ridiculous pvp implications--a frost trap that follows you around seems imbalanced to me, even if it's only 50%.
"We're okay with ignoring diseases on very easy targets but you should never feel like you can build a valid spec or rotation around ignoring Icy Touch or Plague Strike. Some of the 3.1 changes should support this a bit more." GC
I hope they make a smooth rotation, I really like the way Frost can work without PS.
Last edited by Warwolf-Azael : 02/11/09 at 9:25 PM.
It seems they're willing to lead the Deathknights a bit more in the direction it has initially been intended to be played - WITH diseases. But still I've been wondering how Pestilence will ever be capable to compensate the "new" HS, as for know (at least for me) spamming HSs displaces Pestilence easily.
Maybe they could replace some of those horrible blood talents towards the top (spell deflection/vendetta) and put in something that makes PS synergistic, like have PS cause an armor redux or give armor pen to the raid or just increase all damage the target takes (hemo like). Could make it like one of those diseases we got from fighting wolves while leveling up that makes us take more damage from all attacks. That would make people want to use it for themselves and the rest of the raid. Then we would want to use PS without having to rehash our entire system.
But, if they replace OB/BS with +%wpn dmg per disease, you will still reach a point where ~720%wpn dmg > ~600%wpn dmg+%disease wpn dmg+disease dmg. Unless you make the +%disease wpn dmg so much that they'll have to do it to be competitive. So, if you make OB do +5% weapon dmg/disease and BS/HS do +5% wpn dmg/disease, then you have ~720%wpn dmg against ~670-690%wpn dmg + disease dmg and disease strike dmg.
Now, with that stated, Unholy 2h still out dps's disease-less blood most of the time. If this kind of change goes in, Blood may stay the same or decline in dps, while unholy 2h gets a dps increase for doing what they've always done (which is use diseases).
As far as the blood rotation being too simple, how hard are the other rotations? Unholy hits PS, IT, SS, BS, Garg, UB, and DC. Frost hits IT, BS, OB, FS, BT+UA, HB. Blood hits OB, HS, DC, DRW, Hysteria. Blood has slightly less buttons to push for the diseaseless rotation than Frost or Unholy, but not by much. That's not to say I don't know people who go 2h Unholy and just hit SS and BS and do good dps.
Mostly i'm just worried that they're going to change something to make everyone go spec 2h Unholy or DW Unholy and bone the other specs.
Mostly i'm just worried that they're going to change something to make everyone go spec 2h Unholy or DW Unholy and bone the other specs.
That was the case roughly three weeks ago; now damage is roughly equivalent (at least compared to other classes) across builds. They have a lot of levers to pull to balance DPS. That's the easy part. Making all the specs interesting to play is the hard part. If Blood and Frost DPS slips due to whatever change they make to reintroduce diseases to Blood/Frost, they can easily compensate elsewhere.
As far as your skill listing for each spec, it's a little generous. Things on a timer in excess of a minute are hardly a part of a rotation, and HB doesn't figure into single-target Frost at any reasonable gear level and raid comp. You're really looking at (within any two sets of runes):
If you introduce PS to Frost and both disease-strikes to Blood you wind up with all of the specs having to push 5-6 buttons, which seems pretty reasonable. Being able to do competitive damage with only three buttons is sort of facerolly.
If you introduce PS to Frost and both disease-strikes to Blood you wind up with all of the specs having to push 5-6 buttons, which seems pretty reasonable. Being able to do competitive damage with only three buttons is sort of facerolly.
Uh, frost is definitely not "facerolly". It's rotation is very strict and uses a lot more than 3 buttons already. Frost doesn't have room for another attack in the rotation as it is, so if they're going to make PS' use mandatory then they better either make PS be the strike affected by BoTN (to get a deathrune and increase PS' damage), buff PS so that it's worth dropping an OB or FS for (since that will have to happen) or something equally as good.
Like ewok said; if they go to crazy with the mandatory disease stuff, without taking the proper measures, they're just gonna start pushing people back to unholy again.
I've kept my "patch wishlist" mostly to myself but, looking at the changes so far, I'm going to hazard some prognosticating and wish-listing regarding frost, as well as some more general themes of the class and how they're getting reworked.
General Themes:
-You're disease based stupid: The importance of Frost Fever and Blood Plague will be increasing; however, I'd also wager that Icy Touch and Plague Strike will become more of a means to an end than decent damage abilities, as IT is now. A ranged attack that can crit for 3k frost damage for one rune AND add a disease which MAY apply additional effects feels like a bit much. I almost want to make the leap to an 8-10 yard pestilence--that's cast range, not jump range--to assist in spreading diseases more effectively, but I think that's less likely and would be a mostly convenience/pvp buff (although having my current target wander 2 yards out of melée range during an AoE pack definitely happens way too often for my tastes).
--Disease-based "wish": Each tree gets a flavor disease--blood's being the the weakest, but attached to the strongest strike (BS), UH's Blood Plague being the most powerful, but attached to the weakest strike, and UB counting as a 3rd disease while it's up--that gets buffed by talents around the trees; FF is a great example (WF buff & Slows). Additionally, diseases do semi-crappy damage but stack and roll for each DK up to... I dunno, 3 or 5 stacks of each (doing better damage than now by the full stack) and each tree would have a strike/ability that would allow it to consume it's flavor disease for... Something. Anyway, this is the biggest and most out-there wish but I think it would be damn cool (and you simply make strikes/abilities scale by some low % per disease--say 1%/disease for Obliterate--making it possible that some trees want higher average disease levels (less conflagging of their diseases or whatever) but others like quickly building up stacks and burning them down).
-Pushing one button does not result in win: Buffing diseases and/or disease creating strikes already fixes this... Mostly. I still think a nerf to Icy Touch and a corresponding buff to Frost Fever and/or Frost Strike to compensate is in order to counterbalance it.
--Additional buttons to push wishlist: Give Hungering Cold a better PvE use. Maybe make it some sort of 30-second burst ability instead of CC (as with the UH/Blood 51pt talents); maybe add the initial damage back in and keep the CC (an additional HB that cost RP and was usable every minute (and CCd adds) wouldn't be too imba; unsure of PvP ramifications though)
-Less talent point cost for utility: This is becoming a fairly class agnostic theme as of late--allowing classes to spec into powerful raid buffs brought by other classes (that may be absent) to allow for more group composition flexibility--and the reduction in talent points from 9 to closer to 6 (thats my guess) in Frost for FF-Windfury is definitely appreciated; however, are there raid utility talents in Bld/UH that are equally as bloated and/or are they lacking an equally powerful talent? (Ebon Plague and Aboms Might look fine at first glance though, so they're probably ok)
--Wishlist: this actually looks fine; nothing to add.
-Frost Tree Reshuffle, talent moves in UH: Based on rumors, we're looking at the PvP Frost Fever slow talent pair moving to the top, swapping with Glacier Rot, FF-WF going down from 9pts to less (again, my guess is 6), and a reduction in BotN to 3pts to match DRM and the unholy equivalent. All look like solid changes, allowing other specs to get additional utility from FF very easily while requiring a deeper investment to get all of the FF damage buffs. I also love the Garg/UB swap and wish it had been that way since day 1.
--Wishlist: While it is tempting to swap Annihilation to the top of the tree, I like it requiring an investment; 13pts for 3/3 may be steep but I don't think that it would be totally unacceptible to have FF-WF as a 16pt talent rather than the 21pt it is now, making 51/20 builds more prevalent (more variety is almost always good, as long as one spec isn't horribly OP compared to the rest). I'd also consider burying Nerves of Cold Steel 5/10 points deeper, but making it a 5 point talent for a larger Offhand bonus.
I know I missed commenting on at least one change, and that some of the wishlist ideas are a bit, well, wishlisty but I think that at least one or two could add to the discussion in an interesting way, especially the stacking disease thing (and, to go with that, UB would stack up to the max disease charges over its duration and then act like a normal disease (12 or 18s timer, etc etc)).
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
Uh, frost is definitely not "facerolly". It's rotation is very strict and uses a lot more than 3 buttons already. Frost doesn't have room for another attack in the rotation as it is, so if they're going to make PS' use mandatory then they better either make PS be the strike affected by BoTN (to get a deathrune and increase PS' damage), buff PS so that it's worth dropping an OB or FS for (since that will have to happen) or something equally as good.
Like ewok said; if they go to crazy with the mandatory disease stuff, without taking the proper measures, they're just gonna start pushing people back to unholy again.
There's nothing 'too crazy' about structuring a disease-based class such that it's optimal to use diseases.
I don't think Frost is faceroll the way that diseaseless Blood is, but I also don't think it's good design to have the optimal Frost rotation ignore a cornerstone of the class. I don't understand what you mean by "if they make it mandatory they better...buff PS so that it's worth dropping an OB or FS for". If they don't make it better than whatever it would be replacing in terms of resource consumption, then it's not mandatory. In fact, it's mandatory not to use it in that case, the one we have now.
I'm not sure how people envision this being structured such that there's some Blizzard hobgoblin standing over your shoulder "forcing" you to use a sub-optimal skill. The whole line of reasoning is "This skill ought to be optimal. How do we change things to make that the case without crowding out some other commonly used skill?"
Well, to be honest, I don't have a problem with how things are now.
Unholy is a very diseased based spec with lots of talents to back up this claim; they use 2 diseases and get a third through talents as well. Unholy SHOULD use IT and PS and does. Furthermore, their main strike isn't even a true physical attack. It makes sense that they should be the most reliant on non physical damage; diseases.
Frost's main source of damage is, well, frost. The only talents that support diseases in frost's tree are ones that buff IT. PS doesn't seem like it belongs in the frost tree.
Blood has no talents that have anything to do with diseases and hence they don't use diseases. Their DPS is very physically oriented (getting armor pen bundled with a talent screams physical) and hence they don't use diseases.
How things are structured right now seem to make sense. On one extreme, a tree which is pure physical DPS (blood) and on the other a spec which a huge portion of its DPS comes from non physical dmg (Unholy) and a spec right in the middle which uses both (Frost).
What's wrong with this? This is better than "what was intended" imo.
I guess I'm one of the few then that likes the idea of each of the different talent specs playing completely differently. If I wanted to play around with diseases, I would have spec'd unholy.
Unholy has lots of incentive to use diseases. They have talents that increase disease damage, do extra damage if certain diseases are applied, increase magic/disease damage. The only requirements for all of their bonuses is to use PS, but IT is also very effective, but they have a glyph that helps with keeping both up.
Frost has talents that increase frost damage, how novel. They also have talents that increase the effectiveness of OB by massive proportions. The only requirement for them to get all of their bonuses is to cast IT. So they were intuitive with death runes and found a way to maximize their abilities.
Blood has talents that increase physical damage. They also get a lot of crit, but not for the abilities attached to the diseases. They also get bonuses for being at full life. I don't see them getting any bonuses from using diseases. Well, they don't do extra damage beyond what's on their attacks from having diseases... their diseases don't hit very hard... they don't even give any sort of buffs for using a disease.
I guess i'm just annoyed that there are many classes that do great dps by hit 2-3 buttons, but everyone is annoyed when a single DK spec (of >>6<< very competitive ones) only uses 3-4 buttons instead of 5-6. The diseaseless spec on a spreadsheet doesn't even match up to any of the other specs. People use it because it's easy, just like why shamans back in TBC spec elemental just so they had to cast LB and not care about anything. Blood isn't the best spec and neither was elemental shamans, but they were very hard to fuckup and let you pay attention to other things.
Long story short, if they want Blood DKs to use diseases, then they need to give them talents that benefit from using diseases.
That was the case roughly three weeks ago; now damage is roughly equivalent (at least compared to other classes) across builds. They have a lot of levers to pull to balance DPS. That's the easy part. Making all the specs interesting to play is the hard part. If Blood and Frost DPS slips due to whatever change they make to reintroduce diseases to Blood/Frost, they can easily compensate elsewhere.
As far as your skill listing for each spec, it's a little generous. Things on a timer in excess of a minute are hardly a part of a rotation, and HB doesn't figure into single-target Frost at any reasonable gear level and raid comp. You're really looking at (within any two sets of runes):
If you introduce PS to Frost and both disease-strikes to Blood you wind up with all of the specs having to push 5-6 buttons, which seems pretty reasonable. Being able to do competitive damage with only three buttons is sort of facerolly.
What do you mean HB doesn't figure into single target frost? Of course it does, its a regular part of multiple builds single target rotations. In fact it is typically the third largest damage source for DW 0/32/39 variants, and DW 0/44/27. DW builds that include HB do not take it to use exclusively on trash.
As i see it, we can use a simplification of current Dk abilities (obli, hs, ss, bs, etc.)
Total damage=base damage + X% (weapon dmg) + diseasedmg (currently, a fix number depending on how many disease have the target)
This simple equation, show us that as we move deeper on wotlk content and items, we will start seeing more and more diseaseless rotation, it's just a question of when that X% will make using 1gcd and 1 rune to put a disease worthless.
As it seems, we have get to that point with blood spec (being the first spec to get there is logical as blood X% hit harder).
When we will reach that point with frost and UH? or is even possible to get to that point?
Is the only solution to change the disease contribution to a % of weapon damage?
If Ulduar weapons and set are OP, blood or diseaseless rotations will dominate the dk dps?
If this assumption is correct, dw scale worst than 2h with items and weapons. Dw is in the death row?
What do you mean HB doesn't figure into single target frost? Of course it does, its a regular part of multiple builds single target rotations. In fact it is typically the third largest damage source for DW 0/32/39 variants, and DW 0/44/27. DW builds that include HB do not take it to use exclusively on trash.
Dual Wield builds are not considered Frost builds (or Unholy Builds); their focus is such that they benefit from putting their talent points in those two trees--usually investing slightly more in frost--but the reasoning behind why they pick their abilities is totally different from standard 2H Frost.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
What do you mean HB doesn't figure into single target frost? Of course it does, its a regular part of multiple builds single target rotations. In fact it is typically the third largest damage source for DW 0/32/39 variants, and DW 0/44/27. DW builds that include HB do not take it to use exclusively on trash.
3x/3x uses PS, so it's not under discussion. I honestly stopped following DW variants of 44/27 a while ago, but if I recall correctly they use PS as well. The 'problem' Frost is of the (rune tap to start) IT/BS/OB/OB (dump) variety.
I'd also consider burying Nerves of Cold Steel 5/10 points deeper, but making it a 5 point talent for a larger Offhand bonus.
Absolutely not. If anything, I think Nerves of Cold Steel should move up so that dual wielding is more viable, not less. In a perfect world, the choice between a 2hander and dual wield would be purely cosmetic and a few minor point investments (NoCS rather than 2H Mastery). It would take normalizing strikes to work like stormstrike and use both weapons, and shuffling some things around, but it's doable. Then dual wield would be about the equipment you have available rather than twinking out a spec that exploits the unintended synergy between trees.
I guess I'm one of the few then that likes the idea of each of the different talent specs playing completely differently. If I wanted to play around with diseases, I would have spec'd unholy.
Unholy has lots of incentive to use diseases. They have talents that increase disease damage, do extra damage if certain diseases are applied, increase magic/disease damage. The only requirements for all of their bonuses is to use PS, but IT is also very effective, but they have a glyph that helps with keeping both up.
Frost has talents that increase frost damage, how novel. They also have talents that increase the effectiveness of OB by massive proportions. The only requirement for them to get all of their bonuses is to cast IT. So they were intuitive with death runes and found a way to maximize their abilities.
Blood has talents that increase physical damage. They also get a lot of crit, but not for the abilities attached to the diseases. They also get bonuses for being at full life. I don't see them getting any bonuses from using diseases. Well, they don't do extra damage beyond what's on their attacks from having diseases... their diseases don't hit very hard... they don't even give any sort of buffs for using a disease.
I guess i'm just annoyed that there are many classes that do great dps by hit 2-3 buttons, but everyone is annoyed when a single DK spec (of >>6<< very competitive ones) only uses 3-4 buttons instead of 5-6. The diseaseless spec on a spreadsheet doesn't even match up to any of the other specs. People use it because it's easy, just like why shamans back in TBC spec elemental just so they had to cast LB and not care about anything. Blood isn't the best spec and neither was elemental shamans, but they were very hard to fuckup and let you pay attention to other things.
Long story short, if they want Blood DKs to use diseases, then they need to give them talents that benefit from using diseases.
Don't want you thinking that I'm calling you out but I'm going to use your quote.
This is the biggest issue with the DK and, more importantly, with WOW players. The WOW player base is essentially made up of a bunch of monkies that will emulate anything that is easy and/or superior. The travesty of this is that they'll do so, even if they don't have the gear to do it, and most will fail miserably. The reason that so many specs are moving towards a diseaseless rotation or a minimal disease rotation is because 1) the diseases are weak and 2) you can currently get more DPS out of not using them then if you did. IF there were 4 or 5 specs that showed superior DPS for using all diseases, then the entire community would be talking about how great diseases are and we wouldn't be in this spot. I'm still shocked that people actually use a 6x Icy Touch rotation when death runes are available...what does that say about how the current system is working?
I'm a Hunter and have been since release. Since BT, people were running around using 1 shot and purposely clipping auto damage because it was shown to provide the most damage output. It was absurd when it happened... the community knew it and so did Blizz which is why they changed it. The hunter community, much like a lot of DKs here and now, thought it was stupid to change the system but it was necessary because the prior status was in conflict with the original design concept.
Diseases are the core of the DK class and the fact that Blizz is moving towards improving it so that you want to use them is great. It sucks that everyone has grown accustomed to how things are now but the changes should be wholey beneficial in the long run.
PS> Allowing disease tics to crit would be a good start along with normalizing Icy Touch/Plague Strike damage.
02/10/09, 9:06 PM
