Blizzard will tell you intentionally making bad gear makes you look forward to upgrades that are itemized correctly.

The cynic in me says it's because the itemization team is staffed by some of the laziest people on Earth and this way they'll only have to make one thoughtful set, the Icecrown one. Whatever they want to pretend the reason is, it really doesn't matter as long as all classes have equaly subpar stats on them.

Is anyone else concerned that Lichborne may remain the way it is? They seem to be making an effort to work on the Paladin 11 point talents so I would hope Blizzard is aware of the issue, but a 3 minute fear break at 11 points is really quite terrible. Recalling how long Corpse Explosion went as a waste of a point, things are looking grim for Lichborne.

Sounds like a minor-to-moderate loss, if my napkin math is correct?

I don't think this bug has been posted yet.

It's a stranger than usual case of the bug where applying Frost Fever through any means except Icy Touch doesn't proc everything Frost Fever's supposed to proc.

Glyphed Howling Blast procs Icy Talons but not Improved Icy Talons making the Icy Talons line useless in a spec that relies on HB to keep up Frost Fever (PS HB OB BS rotation or similar).

Edit: It works perfectly for applying Chillblains to everything though.

That makes it a bit easier. Now instead of having 3 pieces of Darkruned I want to use (Making getting the 4 piece bonus problematic), there's only 2 (Gloves/Chest). But I'll have to see the available alternatives as far as non-set pieces go before I have any kind of wishlist in mind. Still, the addition of stamina is perplexing at least, and insulting at worst. We don't need any more stamina, it's worthless in large amounts and if I recall correctly, the more stamina there is, the more expensive it becomes. Confirm/Deny on that?

The only thing i can think of when they put all this stam on is maybe for some encounter to help dps stay alive, however i haven't been on the PTR to test Ulduar so i wouldn't know. Just my 2 cents.

As has been said, more stamina? They were considering to low the amount of stamina on warriors gear and replacing it with strength!

Why keep armor penetration? Close to useless for an unholy build. Only useful for blood.

We have about double the amount of stamina on our plate gear as the leather/mail physical DPS classes. If they add stamina to help us stay alive, it only makes sense to give it to them also. As it is now, it just looks like a stat dump to make the iLvl fit.

I'm still confused why adding extra stamina when there already is more than other classes is at all useful. I could understand for PVP/arena gear, but it has no place in PVE gear. A DK isn't going to take more AOE damage than any other class, in fact DKs will actually take the least amount of damage of any DPS class in a PVE encounter.

The mentality that gear should be poorly itemized is a bit silly, isn't that what ilvl's are for? I guess I just don't see other pieces of gear that aren't plate have that much more stam.

Well realistically we were always all going to be wearing ilvl 239 gear(possibly higher from yogg hard/algalon) and not these 226 t8 sets, the set bonuses aren't nearly enough to makeup the stat difference. If they wanted BiS to be the set they would have made the set 232 like they did in previous instances where the tier was between the normal ilvl and that of the end boss.

I don't really see how this change meshes with their "We are going to try and increase the strength and reduce stamina on plate" statement however.

GC as quoted at MMO-Champion.com
And:
That seems to have been their mantra with itemization for quite a while now. There will always be upgrades, but not every piece in the same tier will be an equivilant upgrade. The very nature of providing 'junk stats' on gear endorses forums like this one, where intelligent conversation determines the best gear. Flamingcloud mentioned Blizzard made a statement saying they're going to increase str at the cost of stam, but I've only found a statement to the contrary. Did I miss something?

It seems to me that if they did add more str vs stam, it'd happen in 1-2 item tiers, and not right now. That's more in line with the model they've presented.

The original iteration of our T8 set wasn't in line with (ie. wasn't as terrible as) the warrior and ret sets, so I'm not surprised it go re-done.

It's annoying that plate classes have to be handed badly itemised gear in order to remain balanced, and I'm really not sure why they didn't take the 'reset' with WotLK to balance those classes so that they can get more satisfying and meaningful gear upgrades. But I guess we're stuck with it now since I can't see them nerfing/re-balancing a load of base abilities so that we can have 5-6 stats on our gear instead of 4-plus-loads-of-stamina-filler.

On the other hand, I'm not sure people should complain quite so vociferously, since I guess we're all still doing good damage in relation to other classes while also getting bucket loads of 'free' stamina.

Well I'm not sure if they're going to go ahead and add more STR to plate classes since they seem to rather just provide talents that increase STR percentage, I think warriors are now getting 20% STR with talents now instead of 10% AP. I could see them adding or buffing DK STR talents to give us a bigger increase too.

I was wondering if anyone has ran the numbers on the old T-8 set stats compared to the new stats for item level comparison.

From the latest patch notes:

This is a fairly significant blow to DW specs, as it will reduce Necrosis damage to about 80% of what it is currently outputting.

That made me curious when I first read it. What effects (talents?) are we talking about exactly?

My understanding is it won't benefit from any +shadow damage or magic damage buffs/debuffs, so for instance, Black Ice will not buff the shadow damage that Necrosis does.

No it will still benefit from talents that increase shadow damage, but I doubt Ebon Plague will increase it now. I think there was a bug where it double dipped with all talents.

I think they mean specifically abilities like Blood Presence, which Necrosis double dipped with. It added 15% to autoattack, then 15% to necrosis on top. Now it should just add to auto attack.

This is what they were referring to. Effects like Blood Presence, Bone Armor, Desecration, etc, were applying to both the auto-attack and then again to the resulting Necrosis damage. This was especially prevalent on bosses like Thaddius or Malygos, where you could get 2k Necrosis hit from 4k white swings.

Assuming my math is correct, this will result in an ~30-50 DPS loss for most DW specs.

Did some testing on the PTR this morning.

First test was to see if the ghoul as a guardian (i.e. no Master of Ghouls) snapshots stats when summoned or tracks stats like the pet ghoul. Tested by summoning a ghoul with base stats and watching Claw values, and then popping Unbreakable Armor just prior to summoning a second ghoul. Unbuffed ghoul did 383 damage on a claw, buffed did 420, even after Unbreakable Armor expired. Unsurprising but wanted to be sure. That makes an Unholy subspec with Night of the Dead fairly good for Frost, I think, since you can get a significantly scaled ghoul by lining the summons up with UA.

Second test was to see what, if any, buffs Necrosis benefits from. Short answer: none. It now always hits for precisely 0.2 of what the corresponding white hit was. Tested with various combinations of Blood Presence, Black Ice, Desecration, and Ebon Plaguebringer. That seems a bit of a heavy-handed nerf - I can understand not wanting it to double-dip from global multipliers like BP and Desecration, but now it doesn't even single-dip from Black Ice or EP.

You made that sound like a fact.

Thanks for the testing. The ghoul stats being a snapshot means that Razorice will be going the way of the dodo for any build that incorporates Night of the Dead, methinks. The Necrosis change is unfortunate. The talent was already expensive at 5 points even with the added advantage of double-dipping.

New build.