I think it all depends on what the 'frost swapping' is for DW DK's, I'm predicting that KM gets switched with Endless Winter, which would pretty much kill 0-21-50, and make it alot harder for 32/39 varients to work.

As far as blood goes, I see the sudden death change as pure awesomeness. Think about it, your rotations are suddenly alot less complex, you can have just a little bit of breathing room for once. Diseaseless rotations are all the rage these days, so i could see a

HS OB HS OB

HS HS HS HS HS HS

rotation doing very well, considering a certain amount of RNG, I could see you getting 2 or so casted Deathcoils and 1-3 proc deathcoils, while in blood presence. That rotation would also take maximum advantage of the ArP from Blood Gorged, which i'm hoping is somewhere near 10 - 15% or more, to make it worth it (as a t10 5 point talent mind you)

Take this with a pinch of salt. My buddy at Blizz told me these are a few of the changes being discussed.


Plague strike and Blood plague damage is going up, but the hot removal is being removed.
Glacier Rot is the talent being swapped with Endless Winter.
Runic Power mastery might be going to tier 1 and the 9 point Improved Icy Talons line reworked completely.
There is not much concern about Howling Blast/KM procs being available to a DW hybrid because the plan is to make AoE spamming no longer available in Ulduar. CC will be needed.

Gonna be interesting to see, how the new Blood Boil gonna work. Doubtfull that we gonna have a 30y aoe ability without real cooldown.

I'm guessing that Garg will have to be back on par with DRW since they share the same point requirement now.

This functionality was OP against druids, and worthless against paladins (and shamans for the most part). I would vastly prefer a simple MS effect, which I hope is what they compensate us with.

Unless they super-buff the damage I don't see that being a huge deal. It has an effective cooldown from use of blood runes so unless you are specced into DRM you aren't going to get more than 2 every 10 seconds, and one of those comes at the expense of spreading diseases for more longer term AOE damage.

Even a broken clock is right 2 times a day.

When there are 500+ people suggesting changes there is bound to be 1 with at least some changes that come close.

I also disagree with some of his statements, for example:
-Unholy Blight needs to be changed so it's not completely worthless outside of AoE trash tanking

This just reeks of ignorance in my opinion.

I raided as 10/10/51 DW (4612DPS on patch),and, on Patch UB was 4% of my damage, whereas Gargoyle was 6%. I might have to go back to this spec from 32/39 if they move KM further up in Frost the tree and kill 32/39.

touche

although in my defense, i was linking just because some of the ideas did make sense, i do not endorse that poster as like you said, the UB comment was a bit, off.

DRM is fairly easy to grab as Blood unless you want Butchery or Sudden Doom. As Blood single target TPS is excellent already, making a minor sacrifice in that area for better AoE capability and utility doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff.

With pestilence not doing any damage whatsoever, I'm not sure there is a reason for it to have a rune cost. I could easily see it either having no cost, or possibly 10rp or something equally minor.

I can't even remember the last time I saw anyone specced into Hungering Cold. I'm sure there are people out there that do, but the vast majority of people stop at 50 in frost.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if they moved Hungering Cold up, a 51 point talent should be a reward for speccing deep into a tree. UB isn't, it's getting moved and replaced with a buffed Gargoyle. DRW wasn't, then they made it better.

I think it's a no brainer that HC is either going to be buffed or moved. I guess they could move Frost Strike to the 51 point frost talent and then bump it up to 90% weapon damage or something.

For the most part, the 51 point talents should be big damage moves. Unfortunately the two dps 51 point talents we have give the agro to a pet not the DK, so they are less useful than they could be for tanking.

For pvp reasons there is no way Hungering Cold is going up higher in the frost tree. Not that I wouldn't like for it to be higher.....

Actually I'd love if they made it targetable and affect a single player like blind - they they could just baseline it and give us a better frost 51pt talent.

Why? Virtually no one uses it now. If a talent is "too good" for anywhere but the 51 point slot, but not attractive enough for people to ever spec it, then its useless and should just be removed entirely. Replace it with something more interesting.

Yeah. It is definitely possible to do it that way, but it still requires a setup to get those death runes, so I don't think BB is going to become an OP powerhouse of AOE. Not to mention there are weird issues with death runes for DRM anyway, so it is even more unlikely that you are going to pump out 6 BBs in a row consistently.

In PvE it is useless, however, in PvP it's quite the opposite. I have actually 3v1'd people in BG's and won several arena matches after my partner died because of Hungering Cold. You can get some nasty CC chains going if you know what you're doing with it.

I would be sad to see Hungering Cold go because it's a really amazing CC for pvp, at least for me.
Plus my druid partner and I like to cyclone and lead into Hungering Cold.

I got to thinking about it between classes today. The IT spam builds, while undeniably effective, are not very differentiated, and neglect the other mechanics that make the DK so elegant and complex to maximize dps with. While great for us, I don't think Blizz wants us doing that, so we'll likely see some changes that prevent us from doing these types of builds in the future.

Edited: Grammar

Honestly the most regrettable part is that, while you're right, the IT spam build is really fun. I raided as blood for quite some time, then swapped over to DW when I accidentally ended up with two good 1handers that would have rotted otherwise. Turns out Silent Crusader and Hailstorm was a rockin combo, and it kept me from having to compete over Betrayer.

I've personally had more fun as the dual wield build. It just feels more effective, even though the numbers aren't significantly higher. I hope they work out a dual wield build that still has the same feeling of power,even if that means getting away from IT as a main damage source.

What they might do with Frost is make Howling Blast the 51 point talent and remove the cooldown. That'd probably address most of the issues with it being "overpowered for DW specs"

There is no way BB and the BB glyph will go in like this. Something will be changed. A 30 yard AE instant cast 50% snare for 5 seconds is overpowered, and really impacting for WSG games.

Pure speculation time, since that's what this thread seems to be about. Okay, first of all: they want to encourage us to use both diseases. Consider why people are thinking about running diseaseless blood, or frost with no icy touch. The strikes which scale per disease don't scale all that much. This problem will only get worse as the game scales up - our oblits will keep hitting harder and harder from AP and weapon damage, but the piddly little +97 damage per disease will remain piddly. Even if the disease DPS were somewhat scaled up, it has to go WAY up to make it worth skipping hitting with an ever-more-embeefinated oblit.

They are therefore going to have to change that flat modifier, because I honestly don't see them scaling our DoT damage up too much higher, that would cause some bigger issues in run-and-gun fights. Maybe, though. But if they do convert strikes like oblit, heart/blood strike and scourge strike to scale (say, +5% damage per disease or something like that), they'll have a bigger need to fix ebon plaguebringer. Then they'll have to worry about making strikes that hit hard enough for blood and frost to use, but don't scale crazily for unholy.

The answer for this (or AN answer, more like) is to remove the disease component from CF/EP and return it to UB. Making UB accessible to all DPS/tanking builds that really want it, with a decent DoT and strike scaling factor, puts a bit more parity on the table for the trees. That way, anybody can get 3-disease strikes if they want them, people will be really inclined to put up both their diseases (improved strike scaling), but if it balances out right (maybe a bit of a reduction on UB's DPS or AP scaling, but remember a flat 21 points in unholy would get UB but not Impurity, which is a bit of an inherent decrease in vanilla UB's utility), it wouldn't be required for all DPSers to subspec 21 into unholy.

I'd like to think that this is such an elegant and parsimonious solution to this problem that this is what they'll do. Personally, I like it, but it's pure speculation.

Ah, but with the change to UB, HB will not be mandatory for aoe dps. Because you can already get aoe dps in the unholy tree, where most DW DK's are moving the most part of their talent points anyway.