Mara

We can either discuss the real changes here, or hash through 11 pages of speculation. It seems like a fresh thread is in order, the massive changes and the death of several specs, and several new interesting specs which will likely be born.

World of Warcraft Europe -> Info -> Test Realm
World of Warcraft Europe -> Patch Notes - Patch 3.0.9

* Blood Boil’s damage increased to make up for Pestilence no longer doing damage.
* Blood Boil now does some damage to undiseased targets and extra damage to diseased targets. Its radius has been decreased.
* Blood Plague: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.
* Death Pact: This heal cannot be a critical.
* Frost Fever: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.
* Pestilence does no damage and has only one rank.
* Plague Strike and Blood Plague no longer remove hots. Plague Strike’s damage increased quite a bit to compensate.
* Raise Ally has a >15 min cooldown to keep it out of Arena.
* Raise Dead: Duration lowered to 60 sec. and cooldown lowered to 3 min. The cooldown on this ability now begins when the pet dies rather than when it is summoned.
* Rune of Cinderglacier now procs per minute instead of a 5% chance.
* Rune of Razorfrost now affects Frost damage done by the DK only, but stacks up to 10%.
* Strangulate no longer does damage and has been reduced to 1 rank.


Talents
Blood

* Blood Aura: Replaced with Improved Blood Presence. This allows the deathknight to keep the healing from damage done bonus of Blood Presence in any presence, and increases healing received while in Blood Presence.
* Blood-Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.
* Bloody Strikes now increases Blood Boil damage instead of Pestilence.
* Bloodworms now heal more.
* Dancing Rune Weapon: Fixed a bug making it trigger an unusual number of effects from the weapon equipped by the Death Knight. In addition, it will now only echo Death Knight spells whose primary purpose is dealing damage. Also corrected a bug making the effect last 8 seconds longer than intended.
* Scent of Blood will now proc on a dodge, parry or taking damage, and internal cooldown lowered to 10 from 20 sec.
* Sudden Doom now procs a free Death Coil instead of requiring you to push the button. Ranks reduced from 5 to 3.


Frost

* The following talents have moved in the Frost tree: Runic Power Mastery, Glacier Rot, Killing Machine, Chilblains, and Endless Winter.
* Black Ice now grants 2/4/6/8/10% Shadow damage in addition to the Frost damage.
* Black Ice: Frost Damage bonus lowered to 4/8/12/16/20%
* Blood of the North is 3 ranks instead of 5 for the same effect.
* Chillblains: Now a 15/30/50% movement speed debuff (up from 30%). Moved to position currently occupied by Glacier Rot.
* Endless Winter: Moved to position currently occupied by Chillblains.
* Frost Aura: Replaced with Improved Frost Presence. Allows the deathknight to keep the health bonus of Frost Presence in any presence, and decreases magic damage taken while in Frost Presence.
* Glacier Rot: Third rank added, and damage bonus increased to 7/13/20. Moved to position currently occupied by Endless Winter.
* Howling Blast: Swapped positions with Hungering Cold in the talent tree (HB is now at 51, and HC is now at 31). In addition, the damage bonus for targets with Frost Fever is now only 20%.
* Icy Talons - This talent how has a new icon.
* Runic Power Mastery down to 2 ranks.


Unholy

* Blood-caked Blade: Now has a 3 second cooldown on the effect.
* Desecration: This talent now has a 100% chance to be triggered. Additional points in the talent increase the damage bonus and snare magnitude instead of increasing the chance.
* Epidemic: Epidemic now has 3 ranks (adding an additional 3 sec of disease duration). Magic Suppression is 3 ranks (down from 5) for 2/4/6% magic damage reduction.
* Master of Ghouls: Now also reduces the cooldown on Raise Dead by 60 sec.
* Necrosis: Can now only be triggered by main hand attacks.
* New talent: Improved Death Strike. Increases Death Strike damage by 10/20.
* Night of the Dead: Redesigned to grant a flat reduction on cooldown to Raise Dead and Army of the Dead instead of a reduction from using abilities.
* Outbreak bonus for Scourge Strike lowered to 10/20/30%.
* Scourge Strike: Damage increased.
* Unholy Aura: Replaced with Improved Unholy Presence. Allows the Deathknight to keep the movement speed bonus of Unholy Presence in any presence, and increases rune regeneration rate while in Unholy Presence.
* Unholy Blight and Gargoyle have swapped places in the Unholy tree. Gargoyle is the new Unholy 51 talent.
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Initial Observation:

DKs provide one less raid buff now. Frost Aura was largely a waste, as it didn't stack. Unholy aura probably trivialized some of the movement fights, and they wanted that back.

 

Winco

It looks like Unholy Aura may prove to be beneficial with the reduction on runes, at a glance at least. Looks like the traditional dual wield spec will have a bit of reworking to do as well with the moving of Howling Blast.

 

Illandras

What I find most interesting is that on the MMO-Champion talent calculators, SS and HS is changed to have its damage increased by a percentage depending on the diseases on the target, and that change is not in the patch notes.

There don't seem to be a real source of their patch notes, so i have a feeling that they are quite incomplete.

 

Azrael

ebon plague bringer still doesnt stack, diseaseless rotation seems to remain in tact.

 

urotas

The patch notes and what is on the PTR are very different. Should we consider the patch notes outdated or applying to a newer internal build that's not on the PTR yet? Howling Blast has taken a massive nerf to it's damage it seems. The aoe damage it was doing was perhaps a bit overpowered, but even with the current Howling Blast Frost can't compete with Unholy's aoe threat generation. More changes are coming in the future though, so I wouldn't necessarily panic just yet.

Haven't had the chance to copy my lvl 80 characters yet, but I did some testing with a 55 death knight. Unbreakable Armor reduces all damage from physical attacks by flat amount scaling with armor, so it's a bit like a 20 second block.

At 136 armor it reduces 7 damage
At 955 armor it reduces 48 damage
At 2076 armor it reduces 104 damage
At 3527 armor it reduces 176 damage

Assuming linear scaling at high armor levels, UA will reduce physical damage by 0.05 points per point of armor. At 40000 armor this would be 2000 damage, which is very good. The glyph of Unbreakable armor has been changed to "Increases the amount of damage absorbed by Unbreakable Armor by 1%." UA also no longer gives parry chance, but gives 25% strength instead.

The old glyphed UA used to reduce incoming physical damage by approximately 20% assuming you weren't hitting the armor cap, so the change is a buff to effective health for any incoming hits lower than 10000 assuming 40k armor. I can see this being wildly overpowered in pvp against melee dps though. Reducing all physical damage in pvp gear by 1000-1500 could neuter fast attackers like rogues.

With Frost aoe threat being nerfed and mitigation buffed even further, I see a worrying trend toward frost becoming the mitigation tanking spec and Unholy becoming the aoe threat spec. I guess we'll just have to wait for more changes.

 

Bordon

Wow, that's a very hefty DPS boost for UA if that stays. Great to see.

EDIT: Urotas, since you're on the PTR, can you compare the MMO-champ talents to the ones in game?

 

urotas

The mmo-champion talents seem to be identical to the PTR ones, hence my confusion on whether the patch notes or what's on the PTR is the newer version.

 

JCrowns

Hmm... looks like cookie cutter unholy will make a fotm comeback. With the exception of a few talents trading places, 17/0/54 looks perfectly manageable.

 

Randyll

The functionality of EP needs to be retuned to allow multiple unholy DK's, although, they've said they're doing something about it and the class changes aren't yet final.

On the other hand, the HB change seems to hit Dual Wield specs pretty hard. Wouldn't be surprised if most of the DW specs were now dominantly Unholy instead of the hybridesque 3x/3x builds now.

EDIT: Seems they have made diseases bonuses on strikes scale now. From MMO-Champion's latest patch notes:

I'm guessing this was another quick surgical fix for the diseaseless rotations, the recalculated bonuses offsetting the lowered weapon damage modifier.

 

Fellwraith

It looks like the verbage changed on BoSanc, it only mentions 2% mana returns right now, it doesn't say anything at all about runic power or rage. That could have some pretty big tanking implications.

If Black Ice changes to what's in the patch notes vs what's in the talent calculator, it may make more sense for an unholy build to dip 10 points into frost and forgo the crit and AP talents in blood. In beta that talent affected all shadow damage you dealt, including necrosis.

 

sc0rp

TBH not really because Virulence is now T1 talent and all unholy dps is forced to get 3/3 which shouldn't ever happen because we don't have any alternative (my current 17/0/54 is 2/3 on Virulence and I have all 3 caps (hit, spell hit, expertise) . Alternative unholy build 0/20/51 means glyph of SS need to be rebuild because we will cast more often IT/PS.

 

• Vulajin

Why did you retards make a second thread for this? Did you miss the obviously-titled "Death Knights 3.1: BIG UPDATE," or did you somehow decide that it couldn't possibly contain discussion about this topic?