Saturday, August 2, 2008

My current stats in mostly green northrend gear:

33 comments:

Xathras said...

I know it's been said before but it's nice to know that I won't look like a clown an hour after I step off the zeppelin in northrend. Also nice to see that even the fairly early gear has things like +hit and expertise. I don't remember getting any +hit as a hunter until I hit 70.

Anonymous said...

looks nice but i would like to know how important stats like +spelldmg and spellhit are. could you please say for which specc which stat is best? thx for your blog btw i love it

Unknown said...

I still don't see how DK's are viable tanks yet. They need some major adjusting to mitigation and avoidance, big time. 14k ac and 2.5% dodge @ 77? What. Sure parry is a tad higher, but still going to be completely destroyed by any trash.

I dunno if any of you saw the video of the DK tanking nexus, but he was getting completely demolished every trash pull. Dk's are still far from being capable tanks imo.

Sam said...

We get spell damage from attack power (strength).

There's no such thing as "spell" hit anymore. It's just "hit". Hit rating affects both spells and melee now.

Anonymous said...

I always wandered why your green gear looks exacly like alpha DK starting gear.
Oh and pretty weak stats >.> High stam though

Sam said...

I don't watch videos of other DKs playing. I just go run the instances myself. :)

Tanking as unholy right now is pure crap. That's why he was getting destroyed.

Frost is quite simply the best mitigation tree we have right now.

Then again, with the changes coming soon, you'll be able to get a ton of nice tanking abilities for many builds.

Anonymous said...

could you please post a specc you would chose for pvp right now? there were so many important changes (lichborne and bone armor for example). would also be really nice if you could make another pvp movie again, i love them and watch them again and again.

Unknown said...

I am assuming @ lvl 80, to mitigate normal dmg you'll want to have around 18-20k ac. I am hoping DK's can at least get close to that.

Also, does this mean we have to lose +crit for +def if we want to tank? That's kind of lamesauce :(

Anonymous said...

Not even a +15% parry talent will make us up to par with the other tanks, they're going to have to either drop the all 3 tree = tank/DPS/PvP mentality by just making one of them mostly just for tanking, or just scrap the ability to "tank" altogether.

Lee said...

The gear looks nice, nothing purple or yellow. Is that the sword from Drak'thon (sp?)? Dig the look.

Anonymous said...

hey Jayde i really apreciate your work in the Beta forum, looks like you want the DK to be a compatetive class ;).

maybe you could open a suggestion thread about Death Grip and Chain of Ice (i have no beta key so i cant do this :().

i had some ideas (i hope good ones) on how to fix the mobility issues without addin new talents / skills and mybe you like those ideas.


Death Grip:
- add a 3-5 sec daze effect or maybe even a short root/stun

Chains of Ice:
- chance the debufftype from magic to physical just like those frostbite weaponenchants from shamans, this would prevent a dispelling of the snare after the root
- in addition to that they should increase the snare duration (not the root!) to at least 10 secs, restoring 5-10% runspeed each second instead of 20? or what it is now
- remove cooldown (its limited to your runes anyway)


i really hope you read this comment and like the ideas, you could sell them as your own, i m fine with that ^^ as long as the devs hear about them.... :)

Anonymous said...

Nice, thats a good ammount of attack power for greens. What talent spec are you in this screen shot? Unholy?

Frost is definetly the best for tanking, and Im really excited to see you have that much parry with DPS gear. In tank gear + the new talents we should be able to easily get enough parry and dodge to be great tanks. I still want to see Unbreakable Armor be made into a great tanking skill, but keeping runes makes blade barrier not activate, and using runes puts Unbreakable on a 90 second cooldown.

Unbreakable Armor needs to be changed into 25% chance when you activate a frost rune to give the 25% armor 5% strength and have no cooldown. In its current state its not very helpful, and I think deathknight tanking is deinetly going to get changed a lot before this beta ends.

Anonymous said...

I will just chime in with the original poster...It is very nice to know that I won't look like a clown who's lost his way from his circus car when I get my greens in Northrend. Also I would say that tanking I think is still going to be very viable but gear dependent at 80. I mean if that is the DPS gear then of course you would need gear with dodge, armor, defense, etc for tanking. And I think that is what Blizzard is trying to do in the xpac; make more specs viable for a class to just switch up their gear and be able to do a different job even in the same talent spec. Thats just my 2 cents so take it for what it is worth.

I also should probably stop and say thanks for your hard work on this blog...Heh I check it like 50 times a day:). Thanks for giving information and video footage to those of us that weren't lucky enough to grab a beta invite and I look forward to seeing more from you in the coming months (oh and I hope blizzard is aware that YOU are what a Beta tester should be:)).

Anonymous said...

Leiah, any chance you can comment on Blade Barrier vs. UA/Vamp. Blood change? Ghost commented on it in the forums, but it makes no sense to me. What is she saying? You'll want to constantly be using up runes for Blade Barrier, unless it changed, but that conflicts with conserving one rune to time the other two talents as needed. I r confused.


Q u o t e (how I see it)
I just wanted to hit this point again. Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable armor considered as tanking talents conflict directly with Blade Barrier. Blade Barrier, if you have a good rotation which this update makes much easier, can be up a large proportion of the time. Practically 10% parry for 5 talents points is a great bonus. However, to activate it, you have to activate your long-ish cooldown deep tree talent. If we consider them an added bonus every 90 seconds, fine. For three points, having a short buff every 90 seconds isn't bad, I guess. If the idea is to be able to save those for a timely moment, then that doesn't work with Blade Barrier, which seems presented as a core mitigation talent for any tanking DK.


Ghost response:
The idea was that Blade Barrier would be going off a lot, even unplanned. But when you need a little bit of extra survivability from Unbreakable, you can use a rune at the right time to get it, and ideally you might even be able to get Blade Barrier to go off at the same time. This is a new mechanic for us, though, and it will need some testing to see how it feels.

Anonymous said...

Hmm... Hysteria is a bit cool - in the way that you can "help to kill of that anoying bastard of your own faction" =D
(offtopic , I know)

--Sithril

Breathweapon said...

ATM, neither Blood, Frost or Unholy is the tanking tree, what you have to realize is the tanking tree has been cut down, you pick up the tanking tree by picking the tanking talents in the first 10 talent points of each branch and then you spec to 51 talent points deep in the tree of your choice, where you get the specialized tanking talents that particular tree offers further down.

It'll work, In fact I'm counting on it pissing off non-DK tanks because they wont have as much flexibility.

Anonymous said...

They might get angry over the flexibility, but we're stuck with gimped stats the way it's going now.

Breathweapon said...

Agreed, we need better tier 1 and tier 2 talents in each tree. I'd rather Blood have a flat + 5% Parry tanking talent in tier 1 and Blade Barrier be a tier 4 tanking talent. Spell Deflection and Magic Suppression dropping to tier 2 tanking talents would be appropriate

Eh, I just wish I could strap on a shield, that'd solve 99% of the problems right there.

Anonymous said...

I'm actually pretty happy with these changes for tanking proposes.

Tier 1 talents look all solid except Anticipation which is pretty boring but in line with Unholy being more a Pvp Tree.

Getting 10% Parry, 5% Dodge and 15% Armor is everything i asked for. Blade Barrier is still one of my favorite defense mechanisms!

The "use-your-last-rune" talents don't feel very useful as it contradicts to Blade Barrier as many people have stated but i guess this will change to. I'd rather have this using Runic Power or some other high CD like Lichborne. Some ressource independant abilites would not hurt either.

Other than that Frost is pretty much how i wished it to be. There are still a lot of talents i like to have and i can't have all but thats somehow just great as it leads to some sort of variation.

Things I want to highlight:
- Frost Strike moved to RP
- very clever tweak to Runic Power Mastery
- Lichborne in Frost is much better!
- no more freezes. The new frost fever disease is a very good idea.

Most of my PvE Frost concerns should have been cleared with this.

For Pvp I haven't tested much, but i guess fixing AMS and giving Death Grip some kind of slow/daze/stun will make things much smoother.
What i noticed is having your ghoul up all the time with the next build will probably help here to.
Dks are just not warriors in any sense and they should be easier to kite.

What we should consider is that our Arena Gear will probably have something like "- CD on Chains and or Death Grip".
Having played my warrior pretty much in arena I probably can't tell you how much this buffs your pvp abilities.

This is all I would like to say to these changes as far as we have seen them on US Boards.
I'm no big fan of foreseeing to much ahead. I'll test it and give more feedback then but atm I'm really happy with these changes!

-Saitoz-

Ps. meh another wall of text. sry about that. :>

Breathweapon said...

Just because Death Knights aren't Warriors doesn't mean Death Knights should be easier to kite, Death Knights are Warriors with Intercept and Charge abilities in reverse, with the idea being the Death Knight doesn't come to you, you come to the Death Knight.

We just need a better CD on Death Grip and Chains of Ice and a snare comparable to Shaman Frost Shock and Frostbrand.

I just think the class designers aren't even bothering with PvP issues right now, because DKs are just blatantly awful in PvP.

Anonymous said...

Current:

Unbreakable Armor
Rank: 3/3
Requires 35 points in Frost Talents

Whenever you have no Frost Runes Active, you have a 100% chance to increase your armor by 25% and your total strength by 5% for 10 Seconds. This effect cannot occur more then once every 90 seconds.


an idea a friend had while we were talking about it:

Unbreakable Armor
Rank: 3/3
Requires 35 points in Frost Talents
90 second cooldown

Whenever you have no Frost Runes Active,
you can increase your armor by 25% and your total strength by 5% for 10 Seconds.


This to me seemed a more logical route to the ability, it's uptime is still limited by the cooldown but rather then having to "sit" on a frost rune just in case this leaves you with a panic button on demand. Which in my opinion is more what tanks want and need rather then locking out a rune and thereby lowing dps and the much needed threat for tanking.

Sam said...

I already posted the same exact suggestion a few days ago. :)

Anonymous said...

Hey Jade, just wondering what item DK´s use in the ranged weapon slot? Somekinda rune thingy?
And what does that give you? Somekinda chance on hit thing or stats or what?

Ps. like ur vid´s ;)

-Sazroth

Anonymous said...

Am I the only one who thinks those stats are rather low? Especially those 15% crit look awkwardly low. Even my s2/s3 paladin has more than twice that crit (*and* more attack power), don't even wanna start with my fury warriors stats (both on live realms, level 70).
Oh, and why is the dodge so low, too? Even level 1 chars of other classes have up to 5% dodge. But I guess the few more percent parry make that up.

I assume you're wearing plate gear that's designed for dps warriors, retribution paladins and death knights, right?

So apparently you can have fun with the death knight in crappy gear, which is a good thing. What I really hate about my fury warrior and ret paladin is that you are required to have extremely good gear to have fun, and I'd be pleased if the death knight would not be like that, too.

Anonymous said...

you forgot one thing: crit chance and dodge becomes lower and lower from level to level. the gear jayde has is mostly green and for that i think 15% crit is really good. blizzard said that gear like t6 will be good when you hit 80 (not for a long long time but still good) so i think those stats are in fact good.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, you're right. Having 30% crit in green level 77 gear would result in 60% crit in average epic gear.

However, if you ever leveled a dps warrior or a ret paladin, you'll know that those two classes are extremely dependend on gear, and playing those with 15% crit is just a pain in the ass. But that doesn't seem to be the case with the death knight.

Looking at those stats, I'll probably keep most of my level 70 gear on both my warrior and paladin. I'm afraid it will be like the change from classic WoW to BC: if you're a well geared warrior or ret paladin, your stats will become worse and worse, without new equipment to make up this decay (when leveling my warrior from 60 to 70 I lost about 0.7% crit and hit each level, and the gear that could be found was still worse than my old epics.). But I'm getting off topic here...

Sam said...

Same thing. I have roughly 300+ something crit rating. That's actually quite a bit. My 120 or so hit rating is only about 5% chance to hit an even level mob right now.

There will be a big gear-decay gap between 70 and 80, for sure. Damage is also currently out of control right now, simply because a lot of these new talents and abilities are balanced with level 80 gameplay in mind, similar to how it was at 60 with all the new talents. I've been execute crit from half health by a warrior for 7,500 damage.

It's quite insane. =]

Xathras said...

It's fascinating to watch the beta progress and changes get made and balance be restored. I write business software for my day job and nothing I've ever had to write has changed quite as much as this game. Every build my respect for the devs at Blizzard grows. Please pass my appreciation on to the blizzard dev team. Also, as someone else said, you are exactly the kind of tester that devs love to hear from.

Anonymous said...

There's a few things that "concern" me regarding these stats.

1) hps. Very low. 11k hps at 77? I would have expected 13-14k by that time. I was thinking if prot warriors are running around with 15k easy now, at 80, we'd be seeing 20k. So that would mean my arms warrior should be going from 12k to roughly 17k~. Seeing 11k hps at 77 is disappointing, for being a "tank" class.

2) ac - again very low. 9300 ac is low for a plate user. s3 warrior is around 10k. by lvl 77, I figured you would have at least 10k if not more. Not to mention talents that further increase this.

3) 12.5% parry is aweful for their main core ability. We should see a talent put in for 5% parry *not 25 parry rating!!!*, and again another % of str increase off that. We should be sitting at roughly 20-25% parry rating in our tanking gear easy.

4) the ap/crit is fine, I understand how those work as you lvl up...not a big complaint there yet.

Just a few things I noticed, and am somewhat disappointed in seeing. Granted, these are greens, so I suppose PVP gear should be a lot lot better??

Anonymous said...

do you really think so? i mean if i see a green geared dude somewhere i just 2shot him with my mage. green geared ppl on lvl 70 have about 6k hp i think.

Anonymous said...

Green geared warrior at 70 has about 9k hps. Fully equipped s3 warrior has anywhere from 12k-13k.

So I guess that's not too bad, but I was expecting a bit more. I would have hoped anyways that the DK's hps are equivelent to the warrior's in terms of str/sta/agil.

I know Blizz said it wouldn't be exponential like it was going from pre-BC to BC (going from 5k to 10k). I figured it would be roughly 50% increase, not 100% in WOTLK. So going from 12k to 17k is roughly what I expect. Or as a prot spec tank going from 15k to 20k should be in the cards I thought. But maybe I'm wrong :)

Myrag said...

Hey leiah is there any way to contact you ? meaby through the e-mail. Thanks

Anonymous said...

Just something to throw out there. This picture has Jayde in green Northrend gear with absolutely no buffs. And she is either no spec or Blood spec which means you couldnt see the tank stuff. If you just include some tanking changes that take 5 seconds. armor goes up to about 15k with frost aura. resist all goes up about 50 or 60. ( species change to tauren is up to like 12.5k health ) quite a bit else but I dont wanna make a wall of text that noone cares about. Another aspect though is that DK's are not like warriors where you can sit there and not even press any buttons and be a great tank so long as you have great gear ( there are war's on my realm that could tank 25 man bosses going afk in the middle and have no issues ). Dk's are very ability based, crappy green gear as you saw in the drek'than video ( no clue how to spell that ) was able to tank really well. It all depends on how good you are at thinking forward and planning out your rune uses during a fight. which takes alot of skill. Last point. DK's have the most " oh crap im gonna die " abilities. if you hit them all at once it gives something like ( 98.5% reduction. 25% miss chance. absolutely no magic damage. ( and thats without your gear stats )