Cataclysm Death Knight Changes - Page 12

Max zero · 07/01/10, 12:37 PM

Originally Posted by Griefpb

Unholy builds will most likely go Frost still for their off tree,

Black Ice is still a pretty good synergy, as well as Icy Talons and Runic Empowerment. Filling those to max will get you to Brittle Bones, 4% str inc and physical dmg debuff, but Pillar of Frost is a massive talent for DPS.

That kind of c/d that high up in the tree seems dangerous to me.

The Unholy and Frost trees are still way too bloated right now, but I know Blizz isn't even close to done with them yet. Hopefully they clean them up some and move the talents around, but all around I'm excited about the new trees and talents.

Maybe another wish would be to move Unholy Blight up in the Unholy tree and convert it so Frost Strike is used as well, so Frost, Blood, and Unholy could be arena viable.

Definitely still Frost offspec for Unholy. Real potential for a heavy Deathcoil build as well. Sudden Death proccing free DCs and the DCs proccing used runes back up. Got some good potential there.

Depending on how DW works with Sudden Death, could have the return of DW, DC spam. Except now there would be even more DCs and the DCs would have a 40% chance of bringing back a rune.

stampy · 07/01/10, 5:18 PM

If they succeed in making raid healing more of a decision, and take away always having wild growth and rejuvenation everywhere, then improved leader of the pack and judgement of light may be quite valuable. With only imp LotP and JoL providing it, it would be somewhat rare in comparison to how they are spreading around other raid buffs.

Makes sense to add another source for a free melee splash healing buff.

diospadre · 07/01/10, 11:26 PM

Originally Posted by Fyrestryke

While very helpful for speedier travel, they aren't exactly "must have" talents. They're more of a "quality of life" thing. Lots of people levelled in Blood or Frost for WotLK, they didn't have either of those talents then either. Blood excelled at high level elite killing, whereas Unholy was king of AoE packs. It was all about preference of method. I don't see much of a change with blood being a pure tank tree. They will have a lot easier time soloing harder mobs than Frost or Unholy.

No, they are must haves. You probably spend something like 50% of your time running around while leveling and there wasn't a single mob that blood could kill that unholy couldn't. If you don't level as unholy you're either dumb or just like going slow.

Roop · 07/02/10, 7:11 AM

The more am looking at the trees (yes I am aware they could change) and with the alterations in raid lockouts and size, meaning bringing 1 member with allot of buff's and de-buffs will become more important. The more am looking at a 50/26/0 build and what it would bring.

3 buffs and 3 de-buffs from 1 character, but however loosing out on DRW to me seems a fair trade. DRW is a nice aww shit button, but I can see me living without it in order to bring brittle bones and also improved icy touch’s haste as well as the AP increase and decrease de-buff's.

Dev93L · 07/02/10, 11:35 AM

Originally Posted by diospadre

No, they are must haves. You probably spend something like 50% of your time running around while leveling and there wasn't a single mob that blood could kill that unholy couldn't. If you don't level as unholy you're either dumb or just like going slow.

This just is not true. Unless I just took you too literally and you were referring to speed leveling, but I read it as leveling in general. I leveled just fine as Frost dual wield, and had no problems. I hate Unholy's little ghoul and the flavor of it, and I'll level Blood in Cata. I do not mind if I am the last DK on this forum to hit 85 as long as I had fun for my $15 a month while I was doing it.

Back to the discussion, GC has stated that the trees are still going to be changed quite a bit. Those trees are first passes of an Alpha (now Beta, but they're the same). In other words, these are more or less developer brainstorming sessions (a little hyperbole here for argument) placed into trees so that players can bounce feedback back to them. These talents are 100% sure to change, and we probably cannot even really derive meaningful discussion from them yet. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk or anything, I'm just stating that we can probably get more benefit out of looking in the general direction they want to head in and how we can provide feedback to them for that. I realize most already know this, but maybe some have forgotten.

Link to the post here, it is clear he's talking about all classes.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker | ETA on Mage revamp

Gumibear · 07/03/10, 3:28 AM

What are Unholy Death Knight doing with their frost runes now? With the change to Scourge Strike's cost, I'm puzzled what happens with the frost runes outside of cooldowns and Frost Fever applications.

gia · 07/03/10, 4:17 AM

Not really much to do besides spam IT. I've been doing something along the lines of IT->PS(SS)->BS(SS)->dump->repeat.

Runic Empowerment can potentially switch things up a bit, letting you skip over frost runes if you have enough haste and get some Sudden Doom procs. I'm not really convinced RE is a good talent though, even with runes refreshing 3 at a time instead of 6, we still don't have that many free GCDs because of the increased rune regeneration from haste and UP (assuming UP ends up being better than FP). So, without empty GCDs, RE isn't really giving us "free" abilities, just letting us trade lower damage runes (frost) for higher damage ones and potentially more death coils and more RE procs.

I haven't really given it much play time though, not having my usual rune addon makes improvising a rotation based on rune procs a bit awkward. The fact that often times runes will get bugged and appear refreshed when they are not doesn't help either.

Edit: I forgot to mention that if you spec into Icy Talons you still have to IT every 20 seconds to keep the buff up, even though diseases last 30(45) seconds. Outbreak will refresh Icy Talons as well as diseases though so you can skip 1 IT every minute.

Kaejin · 07/03/10, 5:39 AM

How fast are you generating runic power? Are you pretty much able to use something every GCD? I would think that would have a lot to do with the effectiveness of Runic Empowerment.

gia · 07/03/10, 7:26 AM

Originally Posted by Kaejin

How fast are you generating runic power? Are you pretty much able to use something every GCD? I would think that would have a lot to do with the effectiveness of Runic Empowerment.

I've mostly played without Runic Empowerment due to the rune display issues so I wasn't including that.

Runes refresh every 10 seconds. With IUP giving 15% haste and my 12% haste from items I can get them to about 7.5 seconds unbuffed (though most buffs give "melee attack speed" and not "haste"). Without taking spell haste reducing the GCD on spells into account for the moment, this gives roughly a 5 GCD "rotation". Three of the five GCDs are spent on the F U and B runes and the fourth is a RP dump (IT-PS-BS generates 35 rp and IT-SS-SS generates 40 RP so you have enough RP to DC about 85% of the time). The fifth remaining GCD is empty but can be usually spent on a Sudden Doom proc or a HoW.

Qaenyin · 07/06/10, 10:04 AM

Something that stands out to me is Blood Swarm, the current implementation of the talent seems very inefficient.

Assuming 30 second diseases and Outbreak, you're only going to be plague striking once every 60 seconds. This means that essentially, because you're only blood boiling every 30 seconds, you're only saving one blood rune per 60 seconds. So it's 5 talent points for a dps gain of... one heart strike per minute?

That seems really bad for a tanking talent when you could spend them in things that provide more utility or threat.

As a side note, something no sites seem to clarify: Does icy touch still provide bonus threat in the tanking presence(blood in cataclysm)? The wowhead spell description on the cata site still says "generates additional threat in frost presence" and I'm not sure if it generates it in blood presence or not at all since Blizzard clearly hasn't updated the description.

Kaejin · 07/06/10, 10:37 AM

I've read comments that the extra threat no longer exists. DK tanking in general is borked because of the way they reworked the rune system. It really doesn't seem to lend itself well. People are saying you can end up sitting around with nothing to do for three or more GCDs because you're simultaneously rune starved and RP starved.

Thankfully they're not even close to done with the class. They only patch they were changed in was one in Alpha where they implemented the new talents and rune system, I believe.

Qaenyin · 07/06/10, 10:57 AM

Yeah, I've noticed that. We also seem to be overbloated on glyphs for the blood tree now because of the movement of Bone Shield to the Blood tree. Since I presume Vampiric Blood and Bone Shield to be pretty much mandatory that means choosing between Rune Tap, Rune Strike, Death Strike, DRW and Dark Death, which is a lot of options considering you can only really choose one.

Darsey · 07/06/10, 11:03 AM

Originally Posted by Qaenyin

Something that stands out to me is Blood Swarm, the current implementation of the talent seems very inefficient.

Assuming 30 second diseases and Outbreak, you're only going to be plague striking once every 60 seconds. This means that essentially, because you're only blood boiling every 30 seconds, you're only saving one blood rune per 60 seconds. So it's 5 talent points for a dps gain of... one heart strike per minute?

That seems really bad for a tanking talent when you could spend them in things that provide more utility or threat.

As a side note, something no sites seem to clarify: Does icy touch still provide bonus threat in the tanking presence(blood in cataclysm)? The wowhead spell description on the cata site still says "generates additional threat in frost presence" and I'm not sure if it generates it in blood presence or not at all since Blizzard clearly hasn't updated the description.

You are going to BB every 30 sec however in order to keep your AP debuff up, this talent gives you the option to use UH rune in order to BB. it also gives you some flexibility while AoE tanking.

It sure looks like an odd talent with situational gain, and it might get some twiking, however, it is a bit more then 1HS every 1 Min

Qaenyin · 07/06/10, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by Darsey

You are going to BB every 30 sec however in order to keep your AP debuff up, this talent gives you the option to use UH rune in order to BB. it also gives you some flexibility while AoE tanking.

It sure looks like an odd talent with situational gain, and it might get some twiking, however, it is a bit more then 1HS every 1 Min

Well I'm not so much saying the talent is useless, I'm saying the talent is inefficient for its value. The utility is pretty marginal for even a 3 point talent, 5 points makes it drastically overcosted considering it has no non-utility benefits.

Lanlaorn · 07/06/10, 2:04 PM

Has the Glyph of Disease survived the beta so far? I know they said to treat glyphs like set bonuses in that what's here today may be gone tomorrow but operating under the assumption that it is still in the game it appears like it will be quite powerful, especially for tanking.

A tanking steady state rotation for maximum Death Strikes would be:

Pest, DS // BB, DS // HS, DS, Repeat.

For the 17.5% healing + bubble every 10 seconds. Obviously with DRM you could use Heart Strikes or Blood Boils every other rotation as needed.