The DK Cataclysm changes discussion thread
 

As there are bound to be many exciting new changes, or frightening ones announced in the next few days, this will be the place to discuss them.

Topics for discussion at the moment :


Losing all 'power'esque stats and homogenizing the gear -

Haste effecting rune cooldowns -



More to be listed as information is released.

I wonder how the would add the npc critical hit chance reduction talent. They stated before they didn't want one tank tree, so whichever one they choose to drop it in will have a three talent headstart on lower teirs. Just a thought.

Perhaps it will be a core ability/effect that is only active in Frost Presence?

If our trees don't change significantly, I'm guessing they'll add some critical hit chance reduction to the base 5/5/5 tanking talents.

The problem with that (adding -6 crit to Frost Presence) is that even more DKs will just sit in Frost for PvP. I think that adding it to each of the 5% dodge talent is a decent idea (since PvP DK may not get it). However, that makes that talent overbudget, so maybe they have something creative.

I would expect the solution to lie in the form of Stoneskin. They are going to have to rework the enchant anyways (due to Def being nonexistant), so they may as well knock out two birds with one stone. If it becomes worth taking in PvP over the alternatives, they can simply add some sort of modifier or such making it only reduce crit chance of npcs.

The haste change is particularly interesting. Refreshing runes quicker has a lot of potential, but if it works like IUP currently does, it will be worthless. It all comes down to the grace period, and rune refreshes actually coming in at 8-10 seconds. They need to make the grace period also scale with haste (and IUP, while they're at it) for haste (and IUP) to be desirable. Assuming they do that, however, depending at what ratio haste affects rune refreshes, and what amounts of it are realistic, it could completely change the rotations for some specs.

I was actually worried about this, I think until we get more information we can't say 'The sky is falling' but I know that my current Blood spec rotation has maybe a 1 second window of nothing in the very first rotation, and after that it's more or less constant casting with the occasional 1 second break. (I usually run at about 200 MS) With haste that could be improved to basically chain casting, but would be extremely easy to get overwhelmed. Frost specs on the other hand, which are already GCD starved, will basically hate haste completely, which is somewhat ironic due to their various raid buffs.

That or all DKs will simply sit in unholy presence and stack haste like there's no tomorrow.

Good point, maybe unholy presence is finally becoming viable as a PVE DPS presence- it would be nice to see it used for something other then running around town.

{Edit: Grammar.}

I can understand you're exciting by the upcoming expansion, however there isn't enough information released about it yet to warrant class-specific discussion threads. Please keep your discussion to the BlizzCon thread in General Discussion.

Edit: These types of threads will be fine once testing of the expansion with publicly available information has started.