But that doesn't make sense. Diseases are a portion of our class. Physical damage the other. It's like saying that by giving mages fire spells, frost spells, and arcane spells that they should use them all, regardless of spec. If the ability synergy isn't there, then the ability synergy isn't there. Warlocks have an entire talent tree that focuses on dots, even giving them more dots, yet they also have trees that focus on their nukes. Unholy DKs similarly have a bunch of talents that affect all their diseases. Frost DKs have talents that affect IT strongly and rely on IT (hence why they only use IT in their rotation). Blood has talents that affect their physical damage. So why should a spec, that has talents that focus on physical damage and have no reliance on diseases have to work in non-synergistic diseases.

The problem I see with the potential changes is a far more unlying one. There is no clear or obvious way for Duel Weilders to spec. Now if Blizzard want to keep duel weilding being a viable source of damage then they should look at how it presently works in far greater detail, and that goes beyond just rearranging the Frost tree. Duel Weild builds at the moment work heavily on a couple of factors; most of there damage comes from spells and Unholy has powerful spell boosting talents and our actual spells are frost so we dip into there too. In a 32/39 build you are aiming for the hardest hitting spell whilst boosting up all the workings around it - which in itself is fine and how most specs work. In a 20/51 build you are aiming for big powerful Icey Touches.

If talents like Glacier Rot, Black Ice and Howling Blast go further down the tree then these builds will become unavailable. Of course people will work out some other niche duel weilding spec which works a certain way and does competitive damage but I don't see that as the problem. The problem you have with duel weilding specs is the lack of focus and clarity on how these should or could work.

I don't think Blizzard or the other people on these forums want there to be a duel weild tree anymore than they want a tanking tree. One of the nice things about Death Knights is that they can play a couple of different ways regardless of which tree they focus on.

So lets look at the key problems and viable solutions in general with Death Knights:

1) Disease damage parts of abilities not scaling with abilities (Bonus on Blood Strike, Obliterate, Heart Strike caused by diseases). Why they are static damage bonuses is beyond me, make them scale with attack power.

2) Unholy Runes. These seem to be the unloved brother in the runic world, they do practically nothing by themselves and the one ability they do create is poor. Yes Blood Plague is very powerful in PvP. Stop: Very powerful? It has a 25% chance per tick of removing one HoT from the target. So from a normal Plague Strike it has a good chance for the entire duration to remove a HoT? When there are other talents and abilities which reduce all healing by 50%? I know Blood Plague is not a talented ability but neither is Wounding Poison. Plague Strike hits like a wet fish and Blood Plague doesn't pile on the damage too heavily either. Perhaps the way round this is to buff the Plague Strike or Blood Plague damage and add a buffed HoT dispelling technique to Outbreak?

Now on to some more generic issues: Duel Weild builds always seem a little out of place. We have piles of talent abilities which are all for loving the instant strike but very few which do anything with two weapons. What if you made Frost Strike and Scourge Strike hit with both weapons a la Stormstrike? Whilst we are at it why not make some other changes. Change Blood Caked Blade out of a normalised ability but up it's proc chance, possibly move it further down the tree. Perhaps swap it with Wandering Plague. That way, with your Scourge Strike hitting with both weapons and a buffed Blood Caked Blade it would favour using two very slow one handed weapons as well as a big 2 hander.

With Frost you could move Howling Blast further down the tree, if you removed it's internal cooldown it could make for a worthy replacement for 2 hander Obliterates. Remember that there is a loss of Impurity in this so they will not be hitting as hard but more often than they are now. As an 'out there' sort of suggestion why not have them work off Unholy and Blood Runes? Perhaps change the way Rime procs to work off Frost Fever instead. This does create a problem with cutting your own Frost Fever time with more Icey Touches but if Blizzard changed the way reapplication of DoTs worked to extend the duration up to a maximum rather than reset it it would solve this problem as well as the problems just about all classes dropping dots have with cutting there own dot damage. You could have make a change to Frost Strike so it also hits with both weapons. Perhaps also change Killing Machine back to the way it was.

The idea here is that it would create two viable duel weilding builds which operate differently. Unholy would favour two slow one handers and work off a lot of white based damage, Blood Caked Blade with a healthy amount of damage from diseases and Scourge Strike. Frost would favour two fast 1 handers for the high killing machine uptime with abilities hitting much more often.

My suggestion for Blood would be to combine the damage effect from diseases on Heart Strike back into the raw damage in order to allow for a diseaseless rotation. Thus Blood can work purely off single big hits with a big 2 hander and is not concerned with diseases or spells in any way.

Of course there are some overall problems here. The new form of Killing Machine favours tanks and 2 handers more than the old form, and 2 Handers would like Blood Strike much more due to the weapon damage. This could create some issues with Frost becoming a duel wielding tree rather than a versatile tree. However the vague idea remains. Big slow heavy hitting Blood, faster which many diseases and a constant wave of damage from Unholy and a barrage of strikes with spiking powerful crits in Frost.


Of course the other way to go is to remove duel weilding for Death Knights entirely, but you will still want to have three specs which feel and play differently. What I don't want is a 'drop diseases, double bloodstrike, use whatever ability we have speced for, runic power dump and repeat' regardless of what spec we are.

I'm not sure why you think this is like mages using multiple spell types, and I'm not sure why you think Warlocks who spec into Destruction oughtn't also be casting DoT spells, but analogy-disconnect aside it sounds like you're arriving at the same conclusion that we (and presumably the designers) are:

The elegant solution is for diseases to synergize more strongly with strikes. Then you want to be pressing the buttons that apply diseases.

If that counts as 'forcing', then I'm pretty sure we're just going to have to agree to disagree, and I'm pretty sure you're going to be disappointed. The drift for a long time has been away from '222222' and toward '1233445' for all classes, and any mechanic that promotes '22222' or '232323' is set for the chopping block sooner or later.

The UB/Garg change is not that big of a deal, UB is a vastly under appreciated talent. There are very few talents that are scaling and increase your dps by such a large amount (~223 DPS in my case) for one point. I think people would like it more if they read it for what it really is: Increase your DPS by 48+4% of your AP for 20 seconds, costs 40RP, no cool down. Of course, this goes out the window if they change the co-efficient or base damage once they move the ability to its new place in the tree.

Ghostcrawler on diseaseless rotations: MMO-Champion link

It looks to me like all DKs are supposed to care about diseases. Keep in mind this is from the first wave of nerfs in beta, so some of the discussion is over an old version of the class. Disease bonuses on strikes had just been changed from scalar to static.

Personal soapbox: Right now the two most "broken" DK specs are the diseaseless blood 51/0/20 and the DW-unholy IT-spam spec. One ignores diseases, the other ignores FU abilities, and I don't think either of those things is good for the class. Both of these specs exist because the low-tier frost talents were poorly thought out. Unless you're a tank, your first 10 points in frost go toward nothing but stacking multipliers on Icy Touch, which makes frost an unattractive subtree for blood and makes Icy Touch very strong for a minimal talent investment. Migrating Black Ice and further down the tree and replacing it with talents that are more attractive to blood - Rime, Annihilation, maybe the blood strike component of Blood of the North - would do a lot to break up both those specs. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what blizzard means about shuffling talents in frost.

One important thing about the move is that people who put 21 points into unholy just for UB won't be getting impurity, so the coefficient will be a bit lower. This may serve to counterbalance it entirely - while I might see going 50 in blood or frost with 21 in unholy, I'm not dropping blood gorged or tundra stalker for impurity. So UB is available for everybody, and more powerful for unholy DKs. A relatively elegant solution. If the scaling is still a problem, maybe they could reduce the base coefficient, but buff impurity a bit.

That's the way the class played in early beta and it was pretty clunky. I don't remember which ability cost which, but different abilities used B/U or B/F. The problem is, those sorts of abilities tended to leave you with stranded runes and did not lead to clean rotations or even clean priority systems. They cleaned the rotations up for all three different deep specs quite a bit and the response was a pretty universal "Thank you, the class feels much smoother now." I wouldn't expect them to go back to the old ways.

To add to that - even if they were able to come up with an implementation that flowed better than the early beta version (which I kind of doubt), it doesn't really make the gameplay any deeper IMO. The actual rune combos may change, but given the GCD and rune constraints, you'd still be doing either a 1->1->1->1->2 or 1->1->2->2 strike rotation, same as now.

The runes don't really need a major overhaul. Aside from diseaseless Blood, all specs use at least 4 different attacks as part of the standard rotation (>= 3 rune attacks + RP dump), and the rune mechanics are considerably more complicated than rage, energy or mana. Our cooldowns and AOE options are also (depending on spec) just as or more varied than most other classes.

They do need some slight tweaks to the balance of various attacks (they're obviously not happy about diseaseless Blood, and may be unhappy about 1-disease Frost), but on the whole I think the way runes are paired works quite well.

Cheers to identifying the key issues of DK scaling. Well done.

Diseases do not scale. This is why as we progress with better gear, we will fall behind. Already, our core dps abilities are limited by the +damage per disease modifier. Essentially we're being told what amount of damage we're allowed to do, not by our gear, but by when the developers recognize this to be a limiting factor. It is very possible that by post-ulduar where our weapons are doing 1000+ top end damage, disease modifers will be a minimal contribution to our damage.
Diseases should scale with AP (aka Gear) just like curses etc scale with spell power.

Unholy -- it forces us to use plague strikes or obliterates or scourge strikes. Unfortunaley, plague strikes, except for their hot removal utility, are very low dps / damage generating attacks. Also the static addition damage means it won't scale well as we get better weapons and AP / gear. Plague strike = deals 30% weapon damage plus 113.4

Diseases already do scale with AP, that is not the problem at all. The problem is that the damage bonus per disease on our strikes does not scale and is far too low, additionally the amount that the disease dots scale with AP is too low.

I find it interesting that on this page we have on one hand posters saying that one of blood or unholy runes are the 'orphaned child rune' or similar ... oddly, the rune which is least powerful depends entirely on your spec. If you are still running 2H Unholy, Unholy runes are godlike for Scourge Strikes.

It would be good if peope considered the implications to all specs of their suggestions, or maybe thought more in depth about what they were suggesting.

The biggest issue we face is not having a RP based AE attack ... but could you imagine the whining from that one?

Because you're performing a Scourge Strike with only Unholy Runes, right? The point which people are making is that Unholy Runes have little to no value without a Frost Rune to pair with (hence "orphaned"), as the only offensive ability which consumes only a sole Unholy Rune is Plague Strike, which does no significant damage other than applying Blood Plague (which will only need to be applied at the same time as Frost Fever, which consumes a Frost Rune). Meanwhile, Frost Runes used alone do decent damage when used with Icy Touch, and Blood Runes are converted into Death Runes which can be used more desirably, even if the Blood Runes themselves feel lackluster.

My suggestion was Unholy as an individual rune. In combination with Frost runes Unholy runes are great, they are used for Scourge Strikes, Howling Blasts and Obliterates. But by themselves they are poor, which is why I described them as a utilty rune, a synergy rune if you will. At least Blood runes do an ability which hits for moderate damage.

One thing which would be nice would be to see some attacks which work off a combination of Frost and Blood or Unholy and Blood, particually for certain specs. Eg: If Howling Blast moved deep into Frost but worked off Unholy and Blood and had no internal cooldown you could use your Frost runes for Icey Touches and your Blood and Unholy runes for Howling Blasts. This removes the need found in all specs to have to use Blood Strike (I am aware some specs replace Blood Boil for Blood Strike but it is really the same thing in principle). By having Blood Strike as an 'enforced' ability it limits what Death Knights can do. It then becomes the same if you 'need' to have all diseases up at all times in order for any ability to hit hard. You could just as easily have talents which change the rune requirement of certain spells/abilities, eg: In Frost have a talent which makes Obliterate work off Unholy and Blood, thus you drop your diseases (or perhaps not drop Plague Strike depending on whether you have put talents into Unholy to buff it) and then use you Unholy and Blood runes for big 2H strikes and Frost for buffed up Icey Touches, hoping that Rime will proc for that extra burst of Howling Blast damage.

I understand that the problem here is trying to ensure that all these different specs do comparable damage but I also want to have the class have more customisation. You don't see Frost mages having to throw Arcane Missles or Assassination Rogues having to use Sinister Strikes but you do see Unholy and Frost Death Knights having to use Blood Strikes. I understand that there are talents to convert runes to Death Runes so you can use them how you want, but you are then back to the same rune you had before which creates a rotation with abilities you don't want to use.

My original point about Plague Strike being weak still holds true though.

I keep seeing a lot of talk about what should be changed here and there about skills themselves, but I think the general thread has gotten off-topic to an extent. What we should be looking at is what the goal of the changes might be, based on posts made from GC and the like of the last few weeks, and try and get a feel for what they want.

From my perspective, I see a lot of emphasis on tanking issues across the specs. Personally, I've always been in favor of a specific spec with a specific purpose, a.k.a. Shadow specs/Prot specs/Resto specs, etc., etc... I think this system plays well with the concept of 'dual specs' in the first place. However, this is not what they want, at least for DK's, so that's rather irrelivant.

What they seem to want is for all three specs to be able to tank equally well in both single target and AoE threat, and without being boxed into one type of spec. That's why I'm thinking we'll see Howling Blast get moved up to a 21pt talent like Unholy Blight, and likely see the talents that boost HB to extremes moved quite a ways down the tree to keep it from being OP. It's a logical change that meets the intended purpose.

Aside from those aspects, I really wouldn't expect too many core mechanics to be getting changed anytime soon.

From what I've read over and over, Blizzard intended DK's to use 2H weapons, but they want DW to remain a viable option to give up more options, while not making DW more powerful then 2H use. Therefore 2H weapons are the default, with ideally far fewer builds that can utilize the DW mechanic more affectively, but requiring more dedicated builds.

One of the reasons DW builds work so well is the total ignorance of any armor on the target, and I think that's why we're seeing more of a push on Armor Penitration. This is another logical change to bring our DK physical damage more in line with the spell damage that the DW DK's are pumping out.

Though I would certainly agree that there needs to be big changes in the use of runes themselves. We need more options for our rune spending, such as attacks utilizing FB and UB to open up our rotations. To this end, I'd like to see some sort of disease tacked onto Blood Strike, so it's used more like Icy Touch and Plague Strike, but that might be a bit much, as giving every DK access to 3 or 4 diseases may scew the rest of our attacks too much; at least the ones based on additional damage from diseases in the first place.

Why not add talents lower in the trees that cause Frost Fever or Blood Plague to be applied with Blood Strike? It would negate the use of Plague Strike(or icy touch in non frost trees). People really don't want to use it anyway because of lackluster damage.

This is entirely against the playstyle blizzard is trying to implement for DKs (and frankly, most people on these boards want for DKs). The whole point is to MAKE people *WANT* to use IT/PS... for EVERY spec.

I'd really just like to see an increase to PS damage and some scaling on static modifiers for strikes.

The only way to do this and not mess up all the rotations is to increase the dot damage.
Maybe strikes could somehow scale with the dot damage, that would be new and scaling.

10/10/51 and 0/20/51

So these specs are awesome because I have decent gear but compared with the stats of fellow Dk's in my guild It's lacking quite a bit but I still seem to out dps them with these two specs. I'm doing 0/20/51 right now but I haven't done 25 man naxx with it yet I ended up having to OT the whole place so I was somewhat bummed. On 10 man Malygos I was doing 3k and ended with like 5k dps but that's not a very good fight to base anything off of. with 10/10/51 I did 4.5k on 25 man patchwerk and that's on recount and with quite a bit of latency. Also my guild has had trouble with not having a shaman so no windfury or heroism. Also recount doesn't monitor or record your AOTD, also didn't have a 3% hit buff from a shadow priest and the only boomkin druid in the raid wasn't specced into the 5% increase crit or whatever it's called I don't know the names of every buff.
The reason I bring this up is because if I can pull that with not having the gear and buffs that everybody else who's in hard core raiding guilds then that says alot about the spec. 10/10/51 will most likely be one of the top builds considering KM is moving further down in the frost tree and the fact that gargoyle is going back to what it was pre patch but moving to the 51 point talent which makes it perfect for this spec. All the other specs can you say NERFED. Well not all the specs but quite a few are. The rotation for this spec is so simple I've seen people do PS-IT-BS-BT-IT-IT-BS after that I'll switch to unholy aura pop gargoyle, potion of speed and AOTD since the most popular time I've seen it summoned is either at the begining or at around 50% but I like to just get it out of the way, usually I have to use empower rune for AOTD because all my runes are on CD. then I switch back to blood aura and it's PS-ITx4-PS, then back to the begining. The basic understanding of this is putting blood runes on cd and using all death runes on IT. The last thing is they are changing blood boil so there will be slight variations to see if BS or BB is better. If you haven't seen these specs then just send me a message and I'll be happy to send you back a talent tree. If you have a shaman wait till heroism is up to do AOTD.

Diseases and the "additional damage per diseases" portion of strikes needs to scale somehow, either from weapon damage or AP. Like "attack deals 60% weapon damage + 10% weapon damage per disease".

Scourge Strike could open an interesting play style if it was U only instead of being a mere Obliterate replacement. "Shadowfrost" builds featuring reaping and annihilation could end out shifting Oblits to BF and keeping U for Scourge Strike. Not sure how convivial it would be, but it could certainly be more fun than tossing a SS glyph and spam away.

I also believe DW needs some refinement to stand out (aside from being competitive). Maybe a Mutilate-ish strike which uses both weapons ? Unless they want it to remain at the level of DW = spell spam and 2H = strike spam.

Four ways to make PS decent again:
1. make itself a decent amount of damage, by either increase the weapon damage modifier to 60%, or by increase the dot damage to about 3 times higher.
2. have blood plague give bonus to other attacks that outweigh 1 extra diseaseless ability.
3. combine both options.
4. make PS to generate a death rune, so it feels just like another blood strike.

So far 32/39 DW still uses PS for desecration. That's a good direction to go.

I don't know about the only way. A few other ideas:

Plauge Strike applies an additional debuff that makes diseases tick harder for x seconds, incentivising using it in combination with IT. Apply whatever the EP fix is to this so that it's personal but multiple DKs can use it. Scale strike damage back to compensate for DPS gain. Maybe this is a low-tier unholy talent.

Blood Plauge includes some meaningful raid debuff (maybe mangle-ish) making it compelling under many raid conditions since it's a button you'd be hitting otherwise, freeing up some other debuffer to do something more interesting. The talented speed debuff on IT could be baseline, again freeing another debuffer from watching this. This is an unlikely solution since it introduces an intra-class balance issue to fix a playability issue, but it's worth keeping in mind.

I'm sure the clever folks on the Blizz design team have others as well. There are plenty of ways to encourage players to push those buttons, and they only mess up rotations in that you would have to use skills that, by design, you ought to be using.


A note...one of the problems with making IT and PS attractive (and I think the "tanking" sigil made this painfully clear) is that the ScS glyph is bad for the class. It needs to change.