Friday, August 1, 2008

Early Deathknight Design Philosophies.

Some of you have expressed interest in the thought process that goes into decisions when creating or refining classes. I thought I'd share some of those with you today from the early alpha period from a few months back. I'm going to cover some developer thoughts in regards to some aspects of the death knight. Here are some:

"The reason the presences cost runes to switch is because their effects are so dramatic (more than pally auras) I wouldn’t want players twisting presences while they fight (ie: between swings) to maximize effects. That would feel like shitty required gameplay (and I wouldn’t want to put them on the same gcd as normal abilities).

As far as unholy goes, faster gcd does also equate to a dps boost, your runes will come back sooner since you’ll have spent them faster. Also, you gain the intangibles of not being in gcd when you need to interrupt, etc. If it still feels like too much of a dps loss it’s not hard to adjust the attack speed increase more to offset it.

We considered having unholy presence speed up rune regen, but we didn’t want to balance “more damage” from blood against “more fun” from unholy. Also, the issue of waiting on runes to cool up is easy to adjust too. First, we’re tweaking rune costs to see if that does it, but if we need to we can always make the cooldown on runes 8s instead of 10s, it changes the feel a lot.

Btw we found in our testing that 10s rune cooldowns feels more like a warrior pace, 8s feels like a rogue pace. We felt like DK should in theory feel more like the warrior’s pace.

We’ve also made a few changes to rune costs on various abilities that should have you spending a bit less time waiting for runes to cool up. Also totally agree that we need to start you off with a bunch of flight points (or all)."



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's great to see the developers thoughts, and how they are trying to keep it fun, while providing the community with that good dps/tank class that we are all so excited about.

Oh and this statement caught my attention: " but if we need to we can always make the cooldown on runes 8s instead of 10s, it changes the feel a lot."

I would be surprised if they do something like that, but if they end up doing it, it will be a very nice change.

Unknown said...

"As far as unholy goes, faster gcd does also equate to a dps boost, your runes will come back sooner since you’ll have spent them faster."

What? Am I missing something?
Assuming you use every rune as soon as you have a CD there is no speed boost to rune refreshing in unholy (minus master talents):

Blood round 1- 0 sec, 1.5, 3, etc
Blood round 2- 10, 11.5. 13 etc
Blood round 2- 20, 21.5. 23 etc

Unholy round 1- 0 sec, 1, 2, etc
Unholy round 2- 10, 11, 12, etc
Unholy round 2- 20, 21, 22, etc

Each new rotation doesn't gain any net speed at all, there is no rune boost (unless it's being able to unload the runes faster while someone is in melee range - but I don't think that was intended).