Saturday, August 9, 2008

Initial patch thoughts:

As a quick summary of my issues with this patch:


Unholy Rune Consumption/Demand is still way, way too high. Half of those abilities are reactives, and I simply don't have the runes for them half of the time:

Bone Armor
Scourge/Plague strike
Death Strike
Obliterate
Anti Magic Shell
Anti Magic zone

Help! :( That's not even counting Corpse Explosion, which I simply never take.

If anything, blood of the north (or a talent like it) needs to be in unholy, not frost (especially now that frost strike uses RP, and too much of it IMO).

Frost damage output is pretty lackluster. I think this mostly revolves around how horrible RP generation is and the fact that frost strike is doing far less damage than excepted. You dared to say it, Ghostcrawler, but Frost strike isn't fun to use quite yet. :P

RP generation is low, while RP consumption is high. Solo grinding mobs is one thing, but in a more dynamic and less fluid environment, I find myself struggling with my RP abilities and Unholy Rune abilities.

I still don't like how restrictive it is to use things like hungering cold and dancing rune weapon in a dynamic (pvp) environment. I have to either run around with 100 RP the whole time waiting for a chance to use these abilities to their fullest, or hope the fight lasts 20-30 seconds so that I can build up a ton of RP (which involves 2 rotations, minimum), and A) hope the target is still alive, B) Hope that I'm still alive, and C) Still have a need to pull out, say, a DRW. By then, either the target or I am usually dead, or the target is low enough that I don't need DRW anymore.

DRW and hungering cold are simply too cumbersome to use reliably. They take way too much planning and reservation to use, which is odd, since they have such a low cooldown. You think you'd be using them all the time. Unfortunately, this is a scenario where what's on paper doesn't live up to practice.

DRW and hungering cold are only good in situations where it's OK to never have a need to blow RP on anything other than those abilities most of the time. It simply takes too long to generate the RP needed to make these abilities truly effective.

DRW is especially annoying to use in a fast-paced environment too, as you feel rushed to simply push it out before it's ready. Rushing to build full RP means that your runes and strikes will be on cooldown, so you shouldn't bring it out then, either. It's incredibly frustrating. Great for solo PVE, but a pain in the you know what for pvp, again, especially if you want to be using other things like death coil, death pact, IBF, etc.

Please, please, PLEASE give DRW and HC a fixed duration and RP cost. They are 51 point talents. Make them friendly to use.


Death Strike is fantastic, and is pretty much what I was wishing it to be. I hope this doesn't get changed. It's our anti-mortal strike. The damage on it is actually quite low, but the healing can be fantastic. I especially like how vampiric blood can negate mortal strike on us. Pretty cool. =]

It also seems that scourge strike, while doing roughly 58% weapon damage as shadow, is doing MORE damage than frost strike, which is supposed to be doing 100% weapon damage as frost. \O_o/

Scourge strike is doing 1400 damage non crit, 4450ish on a crit.
Frost strike is doing slightly less, but for 50RP instead of a single rune? What? :(

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

in theory i think you´re right with all the point but i couldn´t test myself because whenever i try to login i get a critical error... i think its because of the frozen rune weapon enchant,which is on my weapon but not in the game anymore :( anyone else with the same problem?

Tlobanac said...

Leiah, any chance for you to make a video that demos the changes to the unholy tree. Maybe a demo of those unholy specs you listed on the Death Knight forums?

Thanks in advance.

Anonymous said...

I saw your post about the starvation of unholy runes and I was alarmed at your suggestion to move Obliterate/Death Strike from 1F 1U to 1B 1F. While this would help slow the use of unholy runes this would only serve to severely hinder Deep Blood DPS.

You see a good rotation for strong DPS in Deep Blood looks like this will various small changes

Icy Touch (Chains of Ice if gap needs closed), Plague Strike, Heart Strike, Heart Strike, Obliterate (Death Strike if enemy will not be killed by Obliterate).

With epidemic you will be able to Obliterate even if you Death Strike once your runes refresh.

Heart Strike in higher ranks will out dmg Blood Strike (as said so by GC). "Heart Strike is still a nice talent because it does exactly what Blood Strike does but with bigger numbers." - GC

You see if Death Strike and/or Obliterate were to be changed to 1B 1F then you would severely cut Blood specc DPS by denying them a Heart Strike leaving you 1U rune for those other skills, but without DPS you have nothing else.

To solve the real problem AMS/Z need to be taken off rune costs and moved to RP cost or just activation. Death Grip NEEDS to be made RP or activation since it is based on a reaction and you can't react with a resource on a 10 sec recharge timer. Additionally Hysteria and Mark of Blood need to be moved to RP cost (say 10) to be useful.

Finally with this said RP needs to be boosted up again since RP would be so required.

Anonymous said...

Chill of the Grave should include Obliterate as should Dirge.

-Saitoz-

Anonymous said...

You can't move Obliterate back to 1B + 1F because the reason Obliterate was moved to 1U + 1F in the first place was because Obliterate usurped Blood Strike as Blood Rune's DPS option. Death Strike as either a 1B + 1F or 1B + 1U rune cost is fine, because then Blood Rune's have to choose between the DPS out put of Blood Strike or the healing input of Death Strike, which is balanced. As it stands, Blood Rune's are dedicated to Blood Strike while Unholy Runes are spread thin between Plague Strike, Obliterate and Death Strike and Frost Runes just seem to be neglected.

IMO, the best option for reducing the reliance on Unholy Runes is to remove the Anti Magic Shell and Anti Magic Zone abilities from Rune costs altogether and make them either Runic Power costs or free.

That leaves Plague Strike, Obliterate, Death Strike and Bone Armor on the Unholy Runes, and it's more than reasonable Bone Armor costs an Unholy Rune given it's ridiculous mitigation.

It's not so much the Unholy Runes that bother me so much as the Frost Runes, we need a 1 Frost Rune strike that has better damage than Icy Touch and utility. IMO, Frost Strike should be untalented and given a 50% snare instead of giving Obliterate a talented snare from deep Unholy. Blood Knights shouldn't be screwed in PvP just because Chillblains and Desecrate are so unaccessible.

Anonymous said...

Jayde,

Nice vids and always enjoy reading your posts on the forums.

If you have a few minutes to respond to me, that'd be great!

1) Unholy prescense is now 35-49% movement speed increase? Can you explain how this works now? I love that the base ability increases run speed, atk speed, and GCD.

2) All rune masteries need to be reworked. The idea behind a percentage based attack to decrease the amount of time it takes for runes to regen is simply ridiculuos.

I'd like your thoughts and perhaps if you agree, post them on the forums?

Each rune masters increases the total runes by 1 for that type. Ie. Blood rune mastery gives you 3 blood, 2 frost, 2 unholy. If you speced and got both blood and unholy, you'd end up with 3/2/3 runes.

OR

Each rune mastery decreases the amount of time runes of that nature take to regen by 2 seconds, providing us an 8 sec cooldown on that particular rune.

I personally like the additional rune option, but I don't know how that would balance out.

3) Night of the dead: How does this work exactly? There are 2 ranks shown, but each do the same thing. Also, every scourge strike decreases the cooldown of Raise dead by 1 min, 5 strikes and u get a free instant cast ghouL? Sounds awesome.

I'm really liking the looks of the unholy tree now. Can you also confirm about unholy blight adding an ADDITIONAL disease, for the "four" that GC talked about?
1 from frost fever, 1 from blood plague, 1 from ebon/crypt, and 1 from unholy blight?

Thanks and appreciate any input you could provide and any feedback.

Wish I were in the beta!! :)