Presumably Master of Ghouls still gives you a permaghoul. The language on MMO-champion was "also reduces the cooldown of your Raise Dead spell..." (emphasis mine). Resummoning every 2 minutes won't let you keep it out full time on Sapphiron, but it's a hell of a lot better than the 5-minute cooldown some specs play with now. (EDIT: Missed the earlier notes, apparently the cooldown now starts when the pet dies rather than when the pet is summoned. So not quite permanent if your ghoul is dying.)
I don't see DS as a huge DPS loss for blood. With the deathstrike glyph back to scaling with runic power, you'll be able to time your deathstrikes to come right before RP dumps and hold some runic power when you know a deathstrike is coming. No idea whether Imp Death Strike is additive or multiplicative or how it interacts with the glyph, but base 60% weapon damage, 30% from the talent, up to 40% from the glyph if you can time your RP usage right. It's not quite Obliterate, but it's probably 120% weapon damage.
Considering you can get the ghoul with 20 points in unholy now, it doesn't look like there's much reason to sub into frost.
By moving Unholy Aura down to 21 points unholy, and Hungering Cold up to 51 points Frost, the changes seem to be encouraging tri-spec tanking, rather than going deeply into any one tree. You could put 45 points into either Frost or Blood, grab UA with 21 points unholy, and have 5 points left over for the tank talents from the other tree. (45/5/21 or 5/45/21). The expertise is relatively easy to replace with gear or gems, and the 51 point talents are mostly skippable for tanking; they add dps.
The exception is that deep frost tanking with glyphed HC is still viable, and it would provide the aoe threat you'd miss by giving up UA.
Unholy tanks could lop off the deep unholy talents, and grab Veteran of the 3rd War (23/5/43) and other Blood tree goodies, or they could plow the extra talent points into Frost for Lichborne or Frigid Dreadplate (this seems a little lackluster to me).
You're thinking of Unholy Blight not Unholy Aura... you are also thinking of Howling Blast being the 51 point in Frost not Hungering Cold. I also don't think any tri-spec or mid-tree specs can compare to deep tree specs, besides on situational fights.
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.
That isn't what I am reading.
"...and the ghoul summoned by your raise dead spell is considered a pet under your control. Unlike normal Death Knight ghouls, your pet does not have a limited duration."
This is from looking at a tanking perspective not DPS or PvP.
Blood
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.
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.
Edited out the stuff I agree with, but on those points:
About Scent of Blood, the patch notes say the cooldown is down to 10secs, making it a rather good talent, and our own version of BoSanct. I'll link that to the runic power mastery quote, they removed BoSanct from DK/war/druids pretty much by making it only give mana back(so only useful to paladins). Thus the scent of blood change. It's not quite as good for obvious reason, but it's at least balanced, since BoSanct was stupid for DKs, especially on a fight like patchwerk with DW attack speed type.
I'm not sure how blood AE was increased however, it seems to be as bad as it was before, especially with mobidity moving up.
About frost, Howling Blast will apply FF after its dmg is done, that's obvious, else the whole doing more dmg with FF up is useless, they might as well make HB an AE version of IT right away. Can't comment about UA until my char is copied and I can test it, the good c hange is the glyph now does something, since currently on live I don't glyph it, the gain is way too low due to ancestral fortitude buffs. I'm not sure how the IBF glyph comes as a nerf to frost specifically, or a nerf at all, it never was a useful glyph in my opinion because it never was hard to keep 20RP all the time when IBF was up. IBF was a good glyph for pvp, and they changed it to another PvP glyph since it's now totally useless while tanking. Also moving HB to 51 makes frost tank lose one point in other trees, which is not much but still.
I don't think we've seen the last of DK changes though, I do expect some nerfs at some point because DKs are too good right now. Especially in the avoidance, I could see them doing something, like changing the dodge/parry rating conversion for DKs or something, it doesn't make sense they decided to make DKs avoidance tanks but also increase DK mitigation/health levels to equal or higher than protwars/protadins. Currently no reason to use either, ferals are still fine due to very high health pool.
Im wondering with the increase to Boil Blood damage if a DW tri-spec might work, something like 23/23/25. Key talent targets being Impurity, Glacier Rot and Bloody Stikes. Glyphs choices being IT, DC and some other.
Edited out the stuff I agree with, but on those points:
About Scent of Blood, the patch notes say the cooldown is down to 10secs, making it a rather good talent, and our own version of BoSanct. I'll link that to the runic power mastery quote, they removed BoSanct from DK/war/druids pretty much by making it only give mana back(so only useful to paladins). Thus the scent of blood change. It's not quite as good for obvious reason, but it's at least balanced, since BoSanct was stupid for DKs, especially on a fight like patchwerk with DW attack speed type.
I'm not sure how blood AE was increased however, it seems to be as bad as it was before, especially with mobidity moving up.
About frost, Howling Blast will apply FF after its dmg is done, that's obvious, else the whole doing more dmg with FF up is useless, they might as well make HB an AE version of IT right away. Can't comment about UA until my char is copied and I can test it, the good c hange is the glyph now does something, since currently on live I don't glyph it, the gain is way too low due to ancestral fortitude buffs. I'm not sure how the IBF glyph comes as a nerf to frost specifically, or a nerf at all, it never was a useful glyph in my opinion because it never was hard to keep 20RP all the time when IBF was up. IBF was a good glyph for pvp, and they changed it to another PvP glyph since it's now totally useless while tanking. Also moving HB to 51 makes frost tank lose one point in other trees, which is not much but still.
I don't think we've seen the last of DK changes though, I do expect some nerfs at some point because DKs are too good right now. Especially in the avoidance, I could see them doing something, like changing the dodge/parry rating conversion for DKs or something, it doesn't make sense they decided to make DKs avoidance tanks but also increase DK mitigation/health levels to equal or higher than protwars/protadins. Currently no reason to use either, ferals are still fine due to very high health pool.
I should have researched more of the changes but I was going off of the mmo-champion site from the OP, at this point SoB looks like a decent talent now compared to what it was, getting about 300RP over a 6 minute duration fight. The change to BoS really does throw my RPM idea out the window too.
I was implying that Blood AoE was buffed because with DS doing more damage then it use to it would be much more viable in my opinion to go 51/8/12 +1 (the 1 point could go in CE?) which then means you can take Morbidity. The change the BB might prove worthy as well. I personally used the IBF glyph because I never run with BoS anymore and it helped me out in some situations.
Sorry if my thoughts seem scattered, still trying to take all of these changes in. My current thoughts:
I honestly didn’t expect them to make THAT many sweeping changes.
**They buff the hell out of Plague Strike so people will actually use it, and in the same patch introduce a glyph to make sure using Icy Touch or Plague Strike more than once a fight a total waste.
**~25%% Nerf to HB, moved to a 51pt talent (fine) – but then they buff Blood Boil and allow HB to apply Frost Fever with a glyph. We may actually get MORE AoE damage using DnD -> HB -> BB than current IT -> Pest -> HB.
My rotation would change that to DnD -> HB -> RT (for Death Rune) -> PS -> Pest. Then simply alternate HB, Pest, and BB.
**They buffed the pants off of Scourge Strike (mostly to fix it’s scaling – needed), but that’s directly opposed to what they need to be doing, and what they said they’d do. They just gave every DK out there MORE incentive to spec Unholy.
**I don't like the change to UA. Yes, it will be nice for trash - but I was never in danger on Trash anyway.
~1200 Damage mitigation per strike on a 25-man Raid boss just isn't enough to justify losing the original damage mitigation + avoidance. Yes, it will scale with effects like Inspiration - but I'm still pretty dubious. Unless I'm missing something - with enough avoidance, Bone Armor will still be better in every regard. Yet another reason to spec Unholy.
Every Frost and Blood rotation is completely screwed with the changes to Plauge Strike and Pestilence. i'm not really sure what Blizzard is intending for us to do. Unholy’s rotation actually got easier, which is hard to believe.
Most of these changes just don’t make sense with what Blizz said they were trying to do.
EDIT: Changed Incorrect 30% nerf on HB to ~25%. Doesn't change the point of the post, or the comment about HB. I originally used 30% as an estimation taking into account Crits as well. All the same, the point remains.
**30% Nerf to HB, moved to a 51pt talent (fine) – but then they buff Blood Boil and allow HB to apply Frost Fever with a glyph. We may actually get MORE AoE damage using DnD -> HB -> BB than current IT -> Pest -> HB.
My rotation would change that to DnD -> HB -> RT (for Death Rune) -> PS -> Pest. Then simply alternate HB, Pest, and BB.
I wanted to comment on this. I don't see where the 30% nerf to HB comes from and the fact that HB applies FF means there is no reason to IT>Pest on trash pulls. I'd imagine the most AoE damage would come from DnD>HB>BB//HB>DnD>BB//repeat and you'd use Pest instead of BB if new adds spawned or were pulled.
I wanted to comment on this. I don't see where the 30% nerf to HB comes from and the fact that HB applies FF means there is no reason to IT>Pest on trash pulls. I'd imagine the most AoE damage would come from DnD>HB>BB//HB>DnD>BB//repeat and you'd use Pest instead of BB if new adds spawned or were pulled.
Is the HB glyph major or minor? If its major then major glyphs are already very crowded for a Frost DK.
Frost DPS glyphs might be crowded, but tanking not so much, currently glyph all threat glyphs(FS RS and OB I think, or IT instead of RS depending on group setup), with UA change probably want that, but still you can replace the other threat glyph by HB if you want.
Also, it's not a 30% HB nerf, it's a 20% nerf. HB is currently 150%dmg, it goes down to 120%, so a 20% nerf.
I doubt the changes are final, some obviously don't work well together, they probably just threw a batch of stuff to see what works better and what people like/dislike and will go from there. I also hope they'll balance UA on the current value to get the same kind of effect, but it feels like it's gonna act like a 20secs shield block type of thing, which doesn't seem that good due to the avoidance removal.
I think the HB glyph is just another option, and I can't imagine it being minor (SS is major). If you aren't def capped without the sigil, you probably aren't going to be using the HB glyph. I'm not going to take a chance that I might miss the 30 sec buff ending before I use IT again because my FF is at 14 secs, so I won't even use the HB glyph. When I hit 540 without it, then I might consider it. It allows players to mix it up.
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?
Actually the cost is an extra Scourge Strike every other rotation, since pestilence does not turn into one death rune. So the glyph still remains quite good.
I wanted to comment on this. I don't see where the 30% nerf to HB comes from and the fact that HB applies FF means there is no reason to IT>Pest on trash pulls. I'd imagine the most AoE damage would come from DnD>HB>BB//HB>DnD>BB//repeat and you'd use Pest instead of BB if new adds spawned or were pulled.
The 30% nerf is the fact that Howling Blast now only does 50% more damage to targets infected with Frost Fever as opposed to the 100% more that it does on live right now. It's a pretty significant nerf. However, with the boost to Boil Blood, it will make a 3GCD AE opener a bit stronger for the very rotation you list.
This is from looking at a tanking perspective not DPS or PvP.
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 HB changes were clearly aimed at the DW specs who only went 31 deep for HB, then up unholy to get Impurity. Moving it and nerfing the damage is overkill, doing one or the other would be sufficient, but I guess they just wanted it not to be used with any sort of unholy synergy (impurity/necrosis/KM/others).
The UA change is the most disappointing though. It hardly looks powerful enough to even justify using it on bosses, and while it is great for trash clearing, it is only great for that. I had hoped that UA would turn into a damage shield of some type, similar to a PW:Shield type effect scaling with armor, but this new version is quite disappointing compared to just about any alternative I've read about for it.
The 30% nerf is the fact that Howling Blast now only does 50% more damage to targets infected with Frost Fever as opposed to the 100% more that it does on live right now. It's a pretty significant nerf. However, with the boost to Boil Blood, it will make a 3GCD AE opener a bit stronger for the very rotation you list.
1.5 (50% bonus) / 2.0 (100% bonus) = 75% of its old damage.
25% nerf.
Edit: also the shift from 30% to 20% black ice/10% to 20% glacier rot applies a modest 1% buff to the glacier rot abilities.
Last edited by Goetterdaemmerung : 02/24/09 at 3:17 PM.
1.5 (50% bonus) / 2.0 (100% bonus) = 75% of its old damage.
25% nerf.
Please note that I wasn't citing the math, I was quoting it, incorrect number and all, to reference my reply.
The pestilence glyph is nowhere near as good as people think. On AE pulls, all you needed was to tab-cycle to a different target and hit a different target with pestilence to perpetuate the diseases, and this should be done to distribute Rune Strikes the same way a decent warrior will tab to cycle single-target threat abilities among all mobs present.
As Pestilence no longer does damage, it glyphs a one-rune zero-damage ability to refresh diseases where two one-rune abilities that both deal damage could be used to refresh them as well. I'm not really sure I'm seeing a point to it on single-target pulls or AE pulls.
The new ghoul ability Ghoul Frenzy is not channeled like mmo-champ talent calc says. I'm on the PTR atm and it says Instant.
I highly doubt the usefulness of this talent since it consumes an Unholy rune every 30sec.
For the ones wondering how much Blood Boil is buffed
Live: 117-143 dmg
PTR: 180-220 dmg + additional dmg vs targets with BP/FF
The UA change is the most disappointing though. It hardly looks powerful enough to even justify using it on bosses, and while it is great for trash clearing, it is only great for that. I had hoped that UA would turn into a damage shield of some type, similar to a PW:Shield type effect scaling with armor, but this new version is quite disappointing compared to just about any alternative I've read about for it.
I'm personally dying to see exactly what the new UA is doing and what exactly the glyph does. If it just takes ~1400 damage off of each hit then it somewhat helps with spikey damage new Death Knights may encounter but in the end game content it won't help out to much besides threat wise at the start of a boss pull with a rotation like IT>PS>OB>OB//OB>OB>PS>IT//Blood tap>UA>ERW>OB>OB>OB// but you'd use HB in place of a few OBs depending on a few factors (AP/weapon damage/sigil/glyphs/ect).
The new ghoul ability Ghoul Frenzy is not channeled like mmo-champ talent calc says. I'm on the PTR atm and it says Instant.
I highly doubt the usefulness of this talent since it consumes an Unholy rune every 30sec.
But if new presence for unholy spec is imp unholy presence and ghoul is still affected by your stats. Then this will be decent to burn through at least once, when Bloodlust is enabled.
Last night was pessimistic skydive in a foolish narcotic shell
As Pestilence no longer does damage, it glyphs a one-rune zero-damage ability to refresh diseases where two one-rune abilities that both deal damage could be used to refresh them as well. I'm not really sure I'm seeing a point to it on single-target pulls or AE pulls.
Old: IT/PS/BS
New: Pest/OB(or ScS)/Free GCD
Depending on what you can do with the free GCD (something consuming Runic), it's pretty plausible that it would be more single target damage. All that last GCD has to do is generate enough damage that it's more than a BS less the amount your two rune strike is better than IT + PS (and if your two rune strike isn't appreciably better than IT + PS, then we're all in a world of hurt, because we're all gonna be in UH pres spamming single-rune abilities like ferrets on crack). Good catch by Cabal though; I forgot that B runes consumed by Pestilence do not convert to D. That muddies things a bit.
I think the change is supposed to make AOE diseasing more intuitive (you no longer have to keep a running tally of which mob has the short disease stack to make sure you don't Pest while tabbed to him), but it has the potential to be a real mess single-target if it's not balanced carefully. I stand by my initial "no way this goes live".
BoSanc may be gone but Discipline Priests have now this:
Rapture (Tier 8 ) revamped. Now a 3 point talent. When your Power Word: Shield is completely absorbed or dispelled you are instantly energized with 1.5% of your total mana, and you have a 33% chance to energize your shielded target with 2% total mana, 8 rage, 16 energy or 32 runic power. This effect cannot occur once every 12 seconds.
I was expecting them to give it too another class, which is why the removal of BoSanc for Death Knights seems weird. Anyone tested if it isnt just a tooltip error ? Also, on first look the Priest version seems weaker so maybe BoSanc just gets a change in a future update.
Depending on what you can do with the free GCD (something consuming Runic), it's pretty plausible that it would be more single target damage. All that last GCD has to do is generate enough damage that it's more than a BS less the amount your two rune strike is better than IT + PS (and if your two rune strike isn't appreciably better than IT + PS, then we're all in a world of hurt, because we're all gonna be in UH pres spamming single-rune abilities like ferrets on crack). Good catch by Cabal though; I forgot that B runes consumed by Pestilence do not convert to D. That muddies things a bit.
I think the change is supposed to make AOE diseasing more intuitive (you no longer have to keep a running tally of which mob has the short disease stack to make sure you don't Pest while tabbed to him), but it has the potential to be a real mess single-target if it's not balanced carefully. I stand by my initial "no way this goes live".
If you're Unholy, then your Plague Strike is going to be hitting like a truck and you're likely to still just be spamming Scourge Strike for your disease refreshes. I think that looking at it as a three-rune group is oversimplifying it.
This feels like two patches collided without communication and melded into one giant misinformation-fest to form some pretty ridiculous amalgamations.
BCB change should not affect 2h, it is simply same as WF CD - targeted against DW. However combined with Garg and especially HB changes it seems that DW will be as good as dead.
I think BCB will be very impacted for 2h. All it takes is for you to lower your swing time to under 3 seconds. Considering this is an Unholy talent it's likely to be in UP and that makes it very possible to dip under 3.0 swing speed.
Consider the case where you have enough haste to lower your swing speed to 2.9 seconds...
T0 Swing - Proc (BCB cooldown 3s)
T2.9 Swing - No chance of proc (BCB cooldown .1s)
T5.8 Swing - Chance of proc
That would mean a gap of nearly 6 seconds between possible procs. This same thing happened with enhancement shaman in TBC when they added the cooldown to windfury. All sorts of wackyness ensued with slightly slower weapons being much better than slightly faster ones, or armor "upgrades" being nerfs because the haste sped melee up too much etc.
The UA change is the most disappointing though. It hardly looks powerful enough to even justify using it on bosses, and while it is great for trash clearing, it is only great for that. I had hoped that UA would turn into a damage shield of some type, similar to a PW:Shield type effect scaling with armor, but this new version is quite disappointing compared to just about any alternative I've read about for it.
I think I'll hold off on the UA change being labeled the most disappointing at this point. That nerf to HB is quite significant, provided they are keeping it on 5 sec cooldown.
My take on UA is that is intended for a very specific types of encounters yet being useful enough to be, well, useful outside of those encounters.
Here is what I envision them thinking when they redesigned it:
1. Useful for tanking lots and lots of mobs that aren't hitting very hard. Lets face it, IBF is good, but its still only 40%. Picture several (like 20) mobs hitting you for 2k each, IBF is only going to make that 1.2k each. Now, same situation with the new UA. If your armor is high enough to resist 1800 (someone did the math in a post above), well now you will only take 200 damage a hit. This is an oversimplification I know, but I think you see where I'm going with this.
2. Would be useful for a boss that hits for weak damage but extremely fast. With this ability you would take less damage.
In fact, from my napkin math using 40% reduction IBF and 1800 resist from the new UA, it would appear that any hit over (approx) 4500 appears to be the break point. IE, if the mob hits for less then 4500 then you get more use out of UA, and if it hits for more, then IBF is better. This is NOT set in stone, I'm simply using round numbers here to show the correlation between the two abilities. (4500 * .4 = 1800) I realize that tanks at 540 defense will have actually have about 41%, but in the interest of using nice, round numbers that are easy to napkin math, I used 40%.
Would I like to see more? ABSOLUTELY. I would love for the multiplier based on armor to be greater. But our problem (as tanks, we want more!) is those DKs that PVP. By upping it too far it becomes a very powerful PVP ability, similarly to what IBF once was. Blizzard is not looking to repeat mistakes here, so I don't see it being greater.
Secondly, we don't know what Uldar is going to bring yet. Perhaps there are encounters in there that make UA more attractive (quick, multiple hits that do smaller amounts of physical damage in rapid succession).
I'm not really prepared to write this change off completely. Yes I would love to see more. But if we get it I feel it may be too powerful in PVP and mess with Blizzards sense of balance. And we all know what happened to IBF when that happened.... The fact that its 20 seconds long makes it useful even if that mob or mobs are hitting you for more then the break point. Is it worth the loss of avoidance? I don't think so, but its clear they are going to change it and complaining about anything has historically never changed blizzards mind.
02/24/09, 2:14 PM
