Do remember that these are proposed changes and subject to fine tuning and/or complete overhaul.
Tehax edit: If you are a crybaby idiot you get double or maybe triple points, depending on how tired and cranky I am. Don't be a crybaby idiot.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. In this preview, you'll get a glimpse at some of the new abilities, spells, and talents in store for the death knight class, along with an early look at some improvements we plan to make to the rune resource system.
New Death Knight Abilities
Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.
Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike -- the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.
This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.
Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent's next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can't reflect an ability, you won't be able to copy it either.
Rune System Changes
While we're satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we're making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here's the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.
* In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they're unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.
* A death knight's runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn't have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can't grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it's impossible to save resources for when they're most useful.
* Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight's attacks are weak. The death knight's rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player's timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren't able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.
* The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.
* As this is a major change to the death knight's mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class's current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.
Talent Changes
Next we'll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we're planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we're intending each death knight spec to perform.
* One of the biggest changes we're making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it's less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn't as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We'd rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the "correct" tree out of three possibilities.
* Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood's niche was self-healing -- fitting for a tank -- as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.
* Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.
Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you'll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.
Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.
You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won't see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.
Frost
* Melee damage
* Melee Haste
* Runic Power Generation
Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.
Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree's play style.
We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.
With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.
I wonder if this means that there will no longer be any standard DK DPS build that is a 2h weapon focused build, but without a minion. If that's the case, it seems odd.
We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.
I wonder if they're also considering changing the Blood tanking rotation. In my view, it was the least tanking-friendly rotation of the 3, since it had the fewest free GCDs. I'm glad they realize Rune Strike needs work. If both maul and heroic strike are becoming on-the-GCD rage-dump abilities that use variable amounts of rage, I wonder if they would do the same thing with rune strike.
I think the biggest opportunity having blood as a dedicated tanking tree provides is letting DK tanks worry less about their resources, and react better to what's happening in the fight. For example, right now Icebound Fortitude requires runic power to use. Shield Wall doesn't use any resources, Divine Protection effectively doesn't either, but Icebound Fortitude does. A pure tanking tree for DKs would allow them to give DK tanks an Icebound Fortitude that used no runic power while keeping it as-is for use in PvP and for DPS DKs.
At the same time, I wonder if a dedicated tanking tree will mean that the notorious survivability of DPS DKs takes a hit. If they can expect all tanking DKs to, for example, take the improved AMS, the standard AMS might be weakened to put DPS DK survivability on par with other DPS classes.
I also wonder if they intend the unholy tree to be the semi-official PvP tree. If we're becoming more like warriors, Unholy could be our version of Arms. AFAIK, nobody does serious PvP as Fury, and maybe they're going to concede that supporting 3 PvP trees is too difficult too.
It's possible we'll keep Frost as a DW and 2H tree just for that reason. It's just a matter of a few talent points at the moment that make a difference, unlike say Enhancement where a lot of mechanics are tied into dual-wielding. It's also possible, if a little harder, to make an Unholy build sans Ghoul.
I hope they're making 2h Frost viable, as it's been my favorite spec back in Ulduar. I really prefer 2h above DW and don't really like pet management, aside from some scaling problems that always come with pets.
I definitely like that we'll finally get a dedicated tanking tree. As Neddie already set, we might get rid of the activation costs of our cooldowns while tanking (a big PITA), and I think balancing for PVP will become much easier. With the actual design of the talent trees, the new Cataclysm system with tree bonusses and mastery would never have worked.
What I'm interested into is if they're gonna nerf the self-healing capabilities of the blood tree. As health pools will obviously increase in Cataclysm and tank damage will no more consist of huge spikey hits, self-healing might become much stronger than today, as a lot of our death strikes are producing overheal right now.
I hope they're making 2h Frost viable, as it's been my favorite spec back in Ulduar. I really prefer 2h above DW and don't really like pet management, aside from some scaling problems that always come with pets.
As much as I agree, I don't see it as likely. GC has been very adamant about Frost being a DW tree (he moved from making "if 2h ends up being viable we won't shoot it down" statements to a more aggressive "our design goal is to make sure you dual wield as frost" stance).
What's interesting and will remain to be seen is where this leads for UH. UH is an extremely peculiar melee specc, with a long tradition of somewhat eccentric scaling with melee stats, with incredible reliance on Strength and much less enfasis on weapon damage; more importantly, it's the most caster-oriented DK specc and the pet specc. It's definitely the most "far out there" (to use GC's words) specc DKs have and thus it remains to be seen if Blizzard will embrace this aspect (fundamentally casting the 2h DK into the "warlock in plate" role) or they will try and tame the specc somewhat to make sure it can better intercept the tastes of all those who were playing the more melee oriented Blood and Frost speccs.
Only thing to do now is wait and see what the class overview has in store for us.
Once incidental effect of this change will be a massive semplification of these boards: not only there will be 1 less dps specc and 2 less tank speccs to theorycraft, but this will also probably mark the death of subspecc diversification, once the blood talents become more aggressively tank-oriented.
12 weeks without a Sigil of the Vengeful Heart drop and counting.
I hope they're making 2h Frost viable, as it's been my favorite spec back in Ulduar. I really prefer 2h above DW and don't really like pet management, aside from some scaling problems that always come with pets.
I really hope this is the case as well. It seems odd to me that what started out as a hulking class that wielded the biggest badest weapons is now being turned into as was said above "warlock's wearing plate armor" and a DW specialised class.
Ive seen snippets from GC around the forum the most notable:
GC, any chance that we'll have a hard-hitting 2h physical dps spec? I adored blood dps (I abhor tanking), and I hate dw dps as well. Pet class? No thx
It's possible we'll keep Frost as a DW and 2H tree just for that reason. It's just a matter of a few talent points at the moment that make a difference, unlike say Enhancement where a lot of mechanics are tied into dual-wielding. It's also possible, if a little harder, to make an Unholy build sans Ghoul.
It sounds... well Ill be honest better than nothing. I would love nothing more than Frost 2H to make its triumphant return. However I wouldn't put money on it. They've made it pretty clear through patches that they want a DW spec. Perhaps through an optional 2H or DW talent in the Frost tree, Frost with Blood Sub spec for the 2H talent or perhaps moving it into the early Unholy tree. See what happens I spose. I really do not want to see the straight out 2H Physical DPS disappear from the DK's arsenal so hopefully we get a bit of a compromise.
While I am upset that my DPS spec is being shelved this does give DK Tanking much more credibility. The problem we've had for a while is the jumble of defensive talents and intense resource management we've had to master. Not only that, the stigma of not having a dedicated tree. This will provide DKs with a solid answer that Blood is now the tank tree rather than the long winded trail of answers which went back and forth between Frost and Blood.
So this can only be seen as a massive improvement from the Tank perspective, they're getting some clear structure and direction with a dedicated tree.
I think it might get a little weird with the presences. The names were perhaps not best chosen from the start to overlap with the talent trees, but now using frost presence for the blood specs and blood presence for the frost specs is bound to confuse some people. I'm hoping they rename them.
I can't completely see any dps dk spec without a pet now since the boost of talent points to level 85 will make the the permanent ghoul pet possibly accessible even as a frost dps dk. I just wonder what's going to happen to dancing rune weapon.
I agree that the presences with Frost being for tanking and Blood being dps and now the change to Blood as the tanking tree feels a bit funny, but we have been tanking in Frost presence since day one and dpsing (for the most part) in Blood, and basically ignoring Unholy so why change? Might actually create more confusion if Frost and Blood were swapped absent some sort of change.
I am waiting to see if they do in fact make a fundamental change to Unholy presence so that it reacts with one of the trees. It just seems a natural fit to have crit multiplier placed on diseases in unholy presence, similar the tier 9 set bonus for crit on blood plague. IF they do something along that line, then I can see them also addresses Frost and Blood Presence so they match the tree.
Originally Posted by Azuma
I can't completely see any dps dk spec without a pet now since the boost of talent points to level 85 will make the the permanent ghoul pet possibly accessible even as a frost dps dk. I just wonder what's going to happen to dancing rune weapon.
I think that we speculate too much, if we assume that the talents for a perma ghoul will stay in the same place as they are today. I could see them moving the perma ghoul talents down the tree out of reach of a deep frost or blood build.
Really I think the biggest boon to all three specs that we'll recieve is that we wont have to navigate through tanking talents in the Frost tree to be able to DPS, etc. We'll likely see some new interesting talents that specifically relate to the purpose of the tree instead of talents that try to be everything to everyone.
When I was a tank, I regreted the fact that I had to spec for threat and had (relatively) nothing to adjust my mitigation. Now as a DPS, I regret the fact that that I can maybe juggle 4 points on my way to 51 in the tree by that point I've really exhausted all the attractive talents out of that tree.
I think that we speculate too much, if we assume that the talents for a perma ghoul will stay in the same place as they are today. I could see them moving the perma ghoul talents down the tree out of reach of a deep frost or blood build.
The problem with that is that if you move the ghoul too far down the unholy tree, DKs leveling as unholy would start as a non-pet class, and end up as a class that depends on their pet for 20% of their damage.
In any case, I think it's a given that they're going to massively rework most of the talent trees, but the DK ones in particular, if they're making Blood into Prot.
From the Warrior Cata Preview:
While we like how Titan's Grip plays, we recognize some warriors liked the Fury tree because of the really fast swings that dual-wielding one-handed weapons could provide. Therefore, we're planning to try out a talent called Single-Minded Fury that is parallel to Titan's Grip and will provide a large boost to the damage of a pair of one-handed weapons.
If they're expecting at least some warriors to go for dual one-handed weapons, at least it will mean that frost DKs are not the only class/spec that wants 1h weapons with strength on them. One concern I had with their announcement was that 1h strength weapons might be even more rare than spell plate, as only one class/spec would want it.
Also from the Warrior preview, but apparently it will apply to all tanks:
Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health.
I don't like this idea, if it requires getting hit to get the buff. As tanks, aren't we supposed to avoid getting hit? What happens if we pop an avoidance trinket or ability, and the Vengeance stack falls off? If it were the opposite, that you got vengeance when you avoided attacks, that would make more sense. That would give us a real motivation to make sure that we didn't just stack stamina, but also kept our avoidance high enough. Instead, especially if our gear starts getting good enough that our avoidance is too high, it sounds like losing your vengeance stack might be a real concern. Does this mechanic make sense to anybody?
Another interesting quote about tanking from the Warrior preview thread:
Perhaps put more succinctly, a lot of tank players just seem to find the survival game more fun than the threat game.
That's really interesting. As a tank, I completely agree. I want to be up there pushing buttons, but pushing buttons for the sake of threat (i.e. making sure my line on a bar chart stays longer than the next longest line) isn't all that interesting. Pushing buttons for the sake of survival (i.e. keep defensive abilities up, react to what the boss is doing, blow cooldowns either when something bad happens or when something bad is about to happen), is much more interesting.
On my warrior, I love being able to disarm Skadi when he starts doing his whirlwind, or spell reflecting Shadow Blast in Old Kingdom. On my DK, timing an AMS properly on Sindragosa is also fun. I even like the non-reactive tanking abilities. On my paladin, I like the feeling that I'm responsible for my own blocking, and have to actively hit holy shield, and it makes for a good tradeoff. If new adds are coming in, I might have to make a choice, do I grab them immediately and put off using holy shield for a few seconds, or do I make sure I stay shielded, and risk them getting a swing off at a healer.
If Blizzard realizes that tanks enjoy "playing the survival game" instead of fighting for top threat, I think that bodes well for the new Blood tanking tree.
The problem with that is that if you move the ghoul too far down the unholy tree, DKs leveling as unholy would start as a non-pet class, and end up as a class that depends on their pet for 20% of their damage.
Remember that DKs start at 55, so you'll "start" as a non-pet class and stay that way for the whole of 2 hours it takes to get to deep unholy if you so wish.
Outbreak is an odd choice. With a minute cooldown, it doesn't really fit the stated goal of being able to quickly disease adds in many cases and it will still make us substitute IT/PS for it as often as we can (1/3rd of our disease applications, essentially). Is this spell really needed? Applying diseases isn't an issue in PvE, and not an issue in PvP (it's keeping diseases on which is the problem there, presumably, and the removal of cleansing totem combined with the Unholy Blight change should resolve that problem). Not a bad ability, but definitely not an an imaginative one or a needed one.
Necrotic Strike is practically pointless in PvE. There might be some niche fights where it's worth using, but not many, and if it doesn't stack with the Necotic Strike debuff of other DK's in the raid, then it becomes nigh-worthless. Alternatively, if it does stack, then there are PvP implications to consider of a 4 DK + 1 Healer comp or some such thing being beastly.
Dark Simulacrum is interesting, and a bit ambiguous as to how it will work. Does it cost runes or runic? Once you copy a spell, how do you unleash it? Does unleashing the spell cost runes or runic? Does unleashing the spell cost a GCD in addition to Dark Simulacrum itself costing a GCD? Can you copy healing spells or buffing spells? If the copied spell has a cast time, do you copy that aspect of it too? Does the copied spell function of your stats or the targets? So on and so forth. Lots and lots of questions! The spell has a ton of potential to be incredibly strong, mind-numbingly weak, or someplace in-between depending on the fight. Likely the latter, which is commendable and ideal.
There's also the question of how much damage will Dark Simulacrum do on its own? Will it become part of our regular rotation regardless of whether or not we can copy a spell?
All three seem like primarily PvP focused abilities, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but would be nice to do something differently in PvE.
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The mastery bonuses for Frost and Unholy are somewhat underwhelming. RP generation for Frost? That, combined with the haste change, will likely push people into using Unholy Presence... an Unholy niche, not a Frost one! Frost may get the most damage-per-runic, but Unholy has more GCDs and more incentive to use UP (by taking IUP) if GCD capping becomes an issue. Just seems like it would be better for Unholy. KM being removed as a talent, made into mastery, and adding Obliterate to it would seem much more interesting to me, and much more Frost-esqe.
That aside, disease damage for Unholy? How dull! This won't change our playing style in any manner whatsoever. "You do more damage from a passive source". Increased disease damage isn't bad, per se, it's just quite uninteresting. Ap increases disease damage, while also increasing most of our other damage. I'm sure mastery will increase disease damage by more than AP on a point for point basis, but that doesn't make it any more imaginative or good, just more/less desirable to maximize damage.
# We want to provide a 2-handed style for Frost since we recognize that pets are an acquired taste. We think we have the design space to do that now that we don’t need to support Frost tanking. We’re definitely committed to making Frost work as a dual-wield tree though -- that isn’t going away.
# Outbreak is free with a 1-minute cooldown. It’s not supposed to completely replace Plague Strike and Icy Touch.
# We’re not sure how we’re going to handle presences yet. We recognize the oddness of Blood death knights playing in Frost Presence and Frost death knights not playing in Frost Presences. We might rename the presences or take some other action.
I hope they post a little more about the new rune system. I think the intentions might be to have half the strikes compared to now and more open GCDs? If that is the case that could make the runic power generation for Frost really nice.
* We want to provide a 2-handed style for Frost since we recognize that pets are an acquired taste. We think we have the design space to do that now that we don’t need to support Frost tanking. We’re definitely committed to making Frost work as a dual-wield tree though -- that isn’t going away.
Looks like the Blood DPSers can breathe a little easier now. There was a lot of grumbling about us being forced to spec into Unholy. Hopefully they make it work and it appears we have the choice between Frost Melee DPS DW/2H and Unholy 2H DPS focused more on Diseases and Ghoul. I was half expecting to see a dedicated PVP tree being announced, perhaps we will see it turn out that way with the placement of some of these new abilities.
This is indeed quite interesting. In the initial announcement, when they dropped the blood bomb, they said they were not sure about 2H Frost DPS'ing and DW Blood Tanking, yet (source). However, the class preview clearly points out that they want a 2H Frost DPS spec (source). No DW Blood Tanking is mentioned, however.
For those confused about the new Rune system, this is basically how it plays out:
Runes start off as: 20/20 Blood, 20/20 Frost, 20/20 Unholy.
Time
Ability
Runes
0 sec
PS
20/20 B, 20/20 F, 10/20 U
1.5 sec
IT
20/20 B, 10/20 F, 11.5/20 U
3 sec
BS
10/20 B, 11.5/20 F, 13/20 U
4.5 sec
BS
1.5/20 B, 13/20 F, 14.5/20 U
6 sec
SS
3/20 B, 4.5/20 F, 6/20 U
7.5 sec
DC
4.5/20 B, 6/20 F, 7.5/20 U
9 sec
HoW
6/20 B, 7.5/20 F, 9/20 U
10.5 sec
Empty
7.5/20 B, 9/20 F, 10.5/20 U
11 sec
SS
9/20 B, 0.5/20 F, 2/20 U
12.5 sec
DC
10.5 B, 2/20 F, 3.5/20 U
14 sec
BS
2/20 B, 3.5/20 F, 5/20 U
15.5 sec
Empty
3.5/20 B, 5/20 F, 6.5/20 U
17 sec
Empty
5/20 B, 6.5/20 F, 8/20 U
19.5 sec
Empty
6.5/20 B, 8/20 F, 9.5/20 U
21 sec
PS
8/20 B, 9.5/20 F, 1/20 U
22.5 sec
IT
9.5/20 B, 1/20 F, 12.5/20 U
24 sec
BS
0.5/20 B, 2.5/20 F, 4/20 U
For the first 14 or so seconds, you don't notice a change, but after that, things shift radically. You basically do 3-4 abilities (PS IT BS DC or SS BS DC) and then have 3-4 empty GCDs, and then do 3-4 abilties (PS IT BS DC or SS BS DC) and then have the empty GCDs... so on and so forth.
Basically, runes won't refresh concurrently - only one rune of a pair can refresh at a time. Past our initial burning at the start of the fight, this means half as many rune abilities (and, subsequently, half as many runic power abilities). They've stated they plan to adjust the damage of abilities accordingly, so it's doubtful the numbers will change much, simply the playstyle of having almost as many free gcds as active one.
Of course, the effects of haste, mastery, Dark Simulacrum, and other such abilities could eat up many of these newly freed GCDs, but it's too early to say.
For people confused about how the new rune system is supposed to work, I believe I understand it and can explain it:
Imagine you have 3 rogue-like energy bars: one red, one blue, one green. Each of them starts at 100, and there's a line at 50. If you use an ability that uses that color, you drop that bar by 50, and it immediately starts refilling, taking 20s to go from 0 to 100, or 10s to go from 50 to 100 (before haste). "Do I have the rune available" becomes "Is that bar past halfway"
Practically, what this means is that you never waste a rune as long as you use it before that bar hits 100, giving you about 10s grace time per rune to use it (much less grace time on average though, since many abilities use more than 1 rune).
If you're tanking you could be waiting till the bars are almost full before using abilities, to make sure you have the runes available for emergency buttons. If you're about to enter a burn phase on a boss, you could slow down your rotation a bit, let the bars fill up, and then quickly empty them during the burn phase.
If you look at the current system in the same way, right now we have 6 bars that fill up and each of them goes to 65, with the first option to use the rune at 50. The extra 15 being the "grace period" where if we use the rune within 2s of it becoming active it's as if we used it immediately. If we don't use it within those 2s, that bonus 15 is taken away, and the bar sits at 50 until it is used.
Heh, looks like Consider posted his explanation while I was writing mine, but I'll leave this here in case an alternate explanation is useful to anyone.
For the first 14 or so seconds, you don't notice a change, but after that, things shift radically. You basically do 3-4 abilities (PS IT BS DC or SS BS DC) and then have 3-4 empty GCDs, and then do 3-4 abilties (PS IT BS DC or SS BS DC) and then have the empty GCDs... so on and so forth.
One clarification: you don't *have* to use those 3-4 abilities right away anymore, because as long as you don't have 2 runes just sitting there, you're not wasting resources. Previously, if you didn't use a rune within 2s of it becoming available, you were wasting that resource, now since the two runes are linked or grouped, your second frost, second unholy or second blood rune only starts "charging" when the first one is available, and will continue charging whenever you use that first one. As a result, you could alter that rotation to do 3-4 abilities, have 6+ empty GCDs, then burst 6 abilities in a row and it shouldn't affect the overall number of abilities you get to use during the fight.
This means that if you happen to have a ton of runic power (say you just used AMS against something like Pungent Blight), you can dump that runic power instead of rushing to use your runes as soon as they become available. It also means that if you have to run away from the boss (Sindragosa), or run out of fire (Marrowgar) or, spread out, or any of the common things we have to do in raids, you'll miss some auto-attacks, but you shouldn't miss out on using any other abilities.
The "game" now becomes making sure none of your resources (runic power or runes) becomes topped off, rather than making sure to use runes as quickly as possible once they become available.
Yes, you don't have to use Runes as soon as they come up any longer, but aside from cases of runic overcapping via AMS (which will certainly jump up in value), why wouldn't you? There might not be the urgency there is now to use a rune as soon as possible, but there's also nothing to gain by holding off on it. If you can do it, in the vast majority of situations, you're still going to use runes immediately once they come off cooldown, for lack of alternatives if nothing else.
Not capping your runes/runic won't really be a game in the sense that you can win or lose. You just can't mess it up, short of afking. A ten second grace period is that generous. That's not to say the class will be too easy to play or any such thing. Who knows. It's simply to say that whatever challenges the class presents, it won't be resource management.
The "game" now becomes making sure none of your resources (runic power or runes) becomes topped off, rather than making sure to use runes as quickly as possible once they become available.
You still need to use the runes immediately when they come off CD (every 10 seconds) or have productive GCDs to fill another 10 seconds for the second set of runes to come off CD (at which point the 6 rune burst makes up for that 10 seconds of "slack"). Any time between a rune is not used in between 10 and 20 seconds is completely worthless. With current abilities this system just means that half our time is spent waiting for runes to refresh, literally doing nothing and in phases where we have to stop DPS for 10+ seconds are not as penalized for it.
Without further information on new abilities (non-rune non-RP abilities, specifically), we can't really make accurate judgments, but upon cursory inspection there are many mechanical problems with this resource system. What's the point of empty GCDs, isn't the goal of engaging gameplay exact opposite?
Yes, you don't have to use Runes as soon as they come up any longer, but aside from cases of runic overcapping via AMS (which will certainly jump up in value), why wouldn't you? There might not be the urgency there is now to use a rune as soon as possible, but there's also nothing to gain by holding off on it. If you can do it, in the vast majority of situations, you're still going to use runes immediately once they come off cooldown, for lack of alternatives if nothing else.
Not capping your runes/runic won't really be a game in the sense that you can win or lose. You just can't mess it up, short of afking. A ten second grace period is that generous. That's not to say the class will be too easy to play or any such thing. Who knows. It's simply to say that whatever challenges the class presents, it won't be resource management.
There's no "game" to it, really.
I think the simplest example is "Rime procs". Once your rune tanks are <100%, you are now free to use GCDs on procs, utility spells (Mark of Blood as a bad example, something like Outbreak or Raise Ally is better), any non-rune damage abilities you have (FS, DC, ghoul summon) all without wasting your resources. Currently, it can actually be a DPS loss to use the damaging spell proc on a talent you spent points in because of the potential wasted rune activity, which is frankly illogical.
Obviously, if we don't have anything else to do, we use our runes. Similarly, if a rogue CAN Mutilate/SS and doesn't need to do anything else, he will. However, this unchains us from needing to spend essentially every available GCD in a 20s period on nothing but our runes, which I'm honestly all about. It's less gaining by holding off on use than it is not losing by holding off on use.
I suspect this will allow far more flexible "rotations", looking a lot more like the Frost priority system than the Blood HS spam fest, with easily available open slots to dump procs, excess RP, or just get out of the fire without guilt.
Edit: Came across this lovely little graphic of the new rune recharge process. Just imagine we have three of those. As each one fills to full in 10s, (per GC's description) I don't think we're in for long, long periods of nothing to do, just a bit more room to move around in, so to speak.
I wasn't expecting the complete reworking of the rune system.
Of course some caution will be needed, but the way the outlined it, it fundamentally seems like a radical hypersemplification of how the class works. I'm not really looking forward to seeing WoW become even easier that it is now, in all honesty, but in a way it's understandable that Blizzard may want to scale down the complexity of the class - while it's not particularly harder to master than other dps classes for "advanced players", it seems to be brutal on beginners, as any visit to VoA probably can show.
I'm absolutely underwhelmed by the direction of the 3 new abilities.
Outbreak is a mystery. It sounds completely useless as it's written. With a cooldown higher than 20 seconds, I don't see it impacting any pve dps or tanking rotation in any meaningful way. With a cooldown compatible with refreshing diseases, you would get a built in GoD mechanic, whose purpose would fundamentally be that of killing PS and IT forever.
So either it's a completely useless tool (outside of Pvping) or it's an attempt to rework the GoD mechanics into all DK dps rotations, and that would mean a massive change in the baseline abilities are balanced. On one hand tho, with the new Rune system taking disease application off the Rune chain could be part of the plan.
The other 2 abilities seem to be completely PVP based. This is my biggest perplexity - nothing of what was announced is actually PVE oriented. It may just mean that they plan to work the PVE abilities in the talent trees, but still it's puzzling
There is a chance that Dark Simulacrum's core functionality will actually have some PVE flexibility. Something like having OB hitting for 15k and Dark Sim for, say, 9k, but with a pretty wide list of pve abilities that you can copy. DarkSim doesn't need you to be the target of the ability, as worded. If the list of PVE-copiable abilities is long enough, it may actually become an interesting sub-2min cooldown strike that you fundamentally use every time the boss is gonna unleash some vicious spell to get a damage boost. Could actually be interesting.
I'm extremely perplexed about UH and Frost's masteries. UH being even more based around diseases will alienate me further from the specc - UH needs to be LESS passive and not more. Spell and melee crit damage does sound interesting for a specc that has some solid +crit talents (supposing they will surive the Cataclysm).
Frost being haste based could work well with the DW/2h project. The 2h variant will be certainly more strike-based than the DW one, so probably we could see differences in AEP of Mastery etc, leaving some theorycraft to be done.
And of course, even if I know it's just damage control and an emergency move, I'm stocked about seeing Frost 2h back.
12 weeks without a Sigil of the Vengeful Heart drop and counting.
04/06/10, 7:44 PM
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