Foxx2405

To be honest thats what i first thought as well. Its a bit confusing this way.

HOWEVER, if it turns out that it doesn't affect the weapon damage component of the strike. Plague Strike will totally and utterly be out of control.
Almost twice as strong as the other attacks is insane for a single rune ability.

 

Cloudgatherer

Wow. Pretty much removes any incentive to cast IT/PS more than once in a frost build. And this will make boss tanking pretty boring. Spend one blood rune (which is converts to a death rune) in a deep frost build to refresh disease for single target tanking. Looks like a "fun" rotation of OB OB OB, OB OB PS BS. Maybe another string of OB if one has epidemic and diseases last over 20 seconds. Very little reason to cast IT (except to keep sigil up), so Rime is less likely to proc, and HB is less likely to be cast. Making it the 51 pointer and nerfing it makes it a "trash only" ability, which is just boring, while at the same time they moved morbidity a level deeper. This seems like too many changes too quickly. There were a few things that clearly needed some adjustment, but I think Blizzard is going a bit overboard with the changes.

 

Fugazor

You saw new Outbreak with +30% to SS yet?

 

Aunva

would be interessting if the same mechanic will be used as for hunters. doing nothing while channeling the ghoul haste effect sounds... wired.

at the moment i think about some kind of this spec. i just love unholy and my ghoul, but our tank-dk plays unholy also and so did i stop as we figured that ebon plaguebringer overwrittes all crypt fever applications (we specced one crypt and the other ebon before to avoid such things)

changes might be: dropping parts of dark convinction for ebon plague if this will be fixed and counts for each dk self. other talents i think around is runic power master for gargoyle duration, epidemic or desecration might also chosen, depens on ignoring dark convinction and dropping rp mastery.

the main concern is still ebon fix or not and how ghoul frenzy will work. glyphs might change to unholy blight. after it was reduced to 40 rp i really liked to use it during raids, longer duration without further costs sound pretty sweet. glyph of icy touch might also be an option, because feeding gargoyle and keeping ub up, even with rp mastery sounds like a bit of work.

 

• Lanky

Some of this stuff absolutely cannot stay: BB glyph snaring anyone especially, , but I think that the scourge strike buffs are deliberate, they saw that it was going to quickly fall behind at the next level of gear in Ulduar and decided to head that off. I already easily hit 7 k strikes self buffed with only mirror of truth in BP, so I'd expect it to gain maybe an additional 1k damage over that. I doubt outbreak will stay at 30% for SS, it will probably go down to closer to 20%, maybe 15.

Plague strike is also really problematic, and I really do not expect it to go live as a 110%+ one rune attack.

 

Anjuna

I hope they make some revisions to this, or add some talents in the middle of the frost tree to make it a bit more varied... as it stands I can't see many "talent choices" for frost tanks.

 

EwokChilli

55%+27%(3 diseases) is 82% * 1.3(outbreak) is 106.6% wpn dmg. Sure it ignores armor, but an extra 35% wpn damage per hit? That'll be hard to make up.

 

• Lanky

We are assuming it modifies weapon damage before AP and not overall damage after all modifiers. I am not good enough with math to determine which one would be less powerful, but we can assume whichever that is, will be how the talent functions.

 

◊ Eej

It also refreshes diseases when glyphed and between it and the pestilence glyph, you'll never have to IT/PS after the beginning of a fight.

 

basto

Where are people getting this from??? The way I understood the patch notes diseases were increased to 15 seconds (from 12) and epidemic was changed to 3 points adding 1 second per point (for a total of 3 seconds) meaning nothing changed for unholy and blood and frost got an extra 3 seconds.

Can someone who has logged in to the PTR confirm this?

 

Lujaar

Dualwield may be dead, but IT/PS spam is here to stay. With glyphed Plague Strike hitting for 80% weapon damage before Outbreak, and Black Ice still in tier 2 (albeit nerfed), I expect to see a lot of IT/PS spam builds crop up on these boards.

IT/PS spam with the IT glyph, Dirge or Chill of the Grave, and a 32-RP deathcoil or froststrike takes 9 GCDs per rune set on average. With Chill of the Grave, no Dirge, IT on death runes, and assuming one death rune for average case:

ABILITY IT - PS - BS - IT - IT - PS - FS - FS - FS
RP------25 - 35 - 45 - 70 - 95 -105 - 73 - 41 - 9

9 GCDs. Too many for blood presence, just shy of enough to justify (untalented) unholy presence. An equivalent unholy cycle that spends the death rune on Plague Strike would have very slightly less runic power but would look about the same, and the new Imp Unholy Presence gives you the exact right number of GCDs to make it work with zero downtime. We don't have enough information yet to do the math, but these changes may have just made the dumb-ass 0/20/51 rotation standard for 2H unholy.

 

Fugazor

Both are 21 sec with 2/2 Epidemic (same as on live) for me. Also EP bug seems to be still unfixed and for some reason I have 74 talents to spend.

 

Dev93L

Well, GC has said recently DW is intended to be on par with 2h dps. A lot more recently than his early comments. If anything, I wish they hadn't released this patch so early because it has all the dual wielders in an uproar. There's a lot of testing left.

I might just be missing something, but how can anyone declare absolutely anything definitive on the first day of testing?

 

◊ Bryne

It's 18 seconds on live, not 21. Epidemic still grants 2 seconds per point.

[Edit]Er, misunderstood. Yeah, 2 points in Epidemic gives you 15 + 6 = 21. It seems like the "extra point" isn't implemented yet?

A plan is just a list of things that don't happen.

 

basto

Hmmm seems like things are pretty piecemeal... guess we will have to wait and see until they get everything in order. 21 sec would be nice but I can't imagine why they would do that since 18 worked very well for the unholy rotation.

 

EwokChilli

They obviously aren't going to keep PS at doing 116% wpn dmg. That'll be disastrous.

 

Darian_TruBlade

The additional support for Death Strike doesn't appear to make it competitive with Obliterate for DPS, but it may become a better option for a Blood Tank. If you aren't speccing for Annihilation current rotations are at best awkward and at worst total chaos. Being able to swap Death Strike for Obliterate opens a number of talent choices.

Aside from the increased survivability and talent choices, Death Strike has a high threat potential if it doesn't overheal. The healing component, if it doesn't overheal, effectively doubles the threat. At my gear level a zero overheal Death Strike will generate 40% more threat than Obliterate on a single target. In fact, the two will be even with as high as ~65% overheal. This is without accounting for Runic Power Mastery and Vicious Strikes.

Two Heart Strikes will still be better threat, even without overhealing.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Griefknight

This is from looking at a tanking perspective not DPS or PvP.

Blood - I'm finding blood less appealing, mainly because we need numbers on how effective 10% Armor Pen, the new Sudden Doom, and Death Strike really are going to be. I'll probably try a 50/8/13 spec with a IT>PS>HS>HS//DS>DS>HS>HS// rotation. The increase to DS makes going x/13/x quiet pointless, which means we can take Morbidity and other Unholy talents.

The change to Scent of Blood for a tank looks like a guaranteed 5 RP every 20-23 seconds, that makes it roughly 15 RP every 60-66 seconds which for a 6 minute fight is 150 RP... which doesn't look good in my opinion.

The change to HS makes it less dependent on gear and more dependent on diseases, which seems like a good change.

The changes to MoM and Bloody Strikes really just cancel out each other and is actually a buff to the Blood tree. The fact that Obliterate isn't apart of Bloody Strikes but did get its damage decreased by MoM makes replacing it with DS even more worth it. Which was probably Blizzards goal from the beginning for Blood to use DS not Obliterate.

In the end, Blood got improved in terms of AoE tanking and possibly single-target tanking. Which currently leaves it at the most health effective tree in my opinion... it may be able to pull off highest ST threat eventually though.




Frost - The changes to frost are probably going to be my favorite part about the next patch.

The changes to Howling Blast isn't expressed clearly enough but the change to the glyph obviously makes HB a good, if not the best, way to start an AoE pull as frost. The only thing I can see that would make it better is if it inflicted FF before HB damage which would initially increase HB damage.

The changes to Unbreakable Armor is making my wonder how well does .05 scale? The 25% (~250) increased strength while increasing your TPS you should get about 1% parry which is an obvious avoidance nerf to the cooldown but the mitigation improvements seem worth it.

The change made to Runic Power Mastery may be worth fill-in points but nothing more at this point in time, maybe the ability to literally spam FS on a fight like Patchwerk with BoSanc if you had the avoidance.

The IBF glyph is an obvious nerf to Frost but this means we can use the HB or PS glyphs instead. There will obviously need to be testing done to decide if you will want to take Glyph of Obliterate or Glyph of Howling Blast if your other two glyphs are PS and FS. I'd say go with HB if you are an off tank or if you're lazy because you can obviously still IT>Pest>Blood Tap>HB but the HB glyph makes using HB on AE pulls much more convenient.

The shuffling in the tree seems to be against DW DPS and for PvP. The fact that Howling Blast is the new 51 point talent it may prove to be a great change and if HB isn't strong enough this may push Blizzard to improve its damage or give it its own effect on the target?

I personally like all the current changes to Frost and it looks like Frost was buffed in every way.


Unholy - This is my most unfamiliar tree post 3.0.8, there aren't to many tanking changes in unholy though so I'll give this a shot.

I found the changes to Magic Suppression and AMZ to be an obviously needed change, I don't know if this means every unholy tank will want to take both of those talents but it wouldn't hurt since unholy aura isn't that required anymore. I'm seeing a 10/8/53 as the new unholy tank build and it includes MS/AMZ.

The changes to UB and Gargoyle are obviously to stop other trees from taking Gargoyle.

The changes to Scourge Strike obviously make unholy ST more competitive with Frost and Blood. The fact that Outbreak increases SS and PS damage by 30% push ST threat to where it needs to be for Unholy, I may be forced to try Unholy solely on the ST changes.



I obviously left out a few things about each tree but most weren't changes I thought were worth the input on. I probably left out a few key details from what I did say and there are obviously many more factors if you think about DPS or PvP.

I felt the need to give my input and see what other say on these immense changes.

 

vyziel

So, does anybody know why the Master of Ghouls has been moved up two tiers?

 

Griefknight

EDIT: What am I saying? The new Master of Ghouls doesn't give you a perm pet but reduces the CD by 60 seconds. This is quiet helpful to blood DPS in the long run.

 

sun

It does give you a perm pet for 16 in unholy.

 

Tharvos

I've heard that there are other specs than just unholy...
And yes, that 21 seconds would help me as a 51 0 20 DK a lot.
With my normal rotation the "finishing" obliterate always hits on the last 0,5-1,5 seconds before the diseases fall off (with Epidemic).
Now assume lag (there is always lag!) and/or movement or other things to look at.
This results in many obliterates that hit with just 1 or 0 diseases left.

Adding additional 3 seconds to the disease timer would fix this issue (21 sec diseases).
So i more than welcome this change, but i really hope, no PRAY that they will swap Virulence with Morbidity again, because right now it destroys a good 51 0 20 unholy subspec...
I have absoluteley no need for additional 3% spellhit, but would love to be able to take Epidemic and Corpse Explosion again (which currently isn't possible without sacrificing singletarget DPS by reducing Necrosis/BCB points).

Don't forget that Blood AoE DPS is already the lowest one out of all three trees and when they now take away CE from the 20 point subspec, i would suffer even more in AoE situations.

My english isn't perfect, but i hope you can understand it.

 

Megaera

With the Pest glyph, the ScS glyph is now pretty terrible. It's worth at most (and by 'at most' I mean the glyph procced often enough to keep 100% disease uptime, which we know won't happen) 1 Blood Strike every 24 seconds on single target, and worth nothing on any multi-target scenario. It also (unless they find a workaround) will cost you disease ticks with ill-timed refreshes, reducing its value further.

I can't imagine the Pest glyph going live in its current state. It not only totally invalidates a major strike glyph and the base tanking sigil, but also the opportunity cost for keeping diseases up for Blood (an HS) is significantly higher than for other specs (a BS or maybe BB under heavy haste), which seems out of whack if the goal was to integrate diseases into Blood play. Worse, this completely undercuts the value of glyphing the disease applying strikes (since they can be bypassed after the pull unless you spend significant time off of target).

Given the above, I'm not sure what glyphs an Unholy DK is using. Ghoul, the new Death Coil, and then...Blood Strike?

 

Odii

Also remember Might of Morgaine and Vicious Strikes should stack, leaving Death Strike with a very high crit bonus.