Thursday, August 21, 2008

Proposed Icy Touch Fix:

Here.

Base ability: Icy Touch applies 60% of your weapon damage as frost damage, and afflicts the target with frost fever. (No functionality change from how it works now, just scales different, and by different I mean better)

It really sucks that as I get better and better weapons, I see my icy touch still hitting for the same old crappy 500 damage, which is barely over a single disease tick of damage, whereas my heart strikes and frost strikes are doing boat loads of damage.


Imp Icy touch = Your icy touch deals 10/20/30% more damage, and slows for an additional 1/3/5%. (Same as it is now, but actually is more attractive due to better base ability scaling)

Horrible spell damage scaling problem solved (IT will scale off of weapon damage instead.) No good spammable single frost rune damage ability problem solved. (Helps RP generation in frost)

Add it to guile of gorefiend.

19 comments:

Wikt said...

Yeah, then make Death Coil %weapon damage, then make everything %weapon damage that already isn't. Question is, where can it stop?

Unknown said...

My one problem with that idea is if you turn Icy Touch into a strike what else are we going to use for ranged pulls. Sure we have Death Grip but seems a little odd to use our only taunt(once blood boil change gets in) every time we need to pull.

Anonymous said...

He never said it would be melee...

Alrenous said...

I think having IT being kind of pathetic is nifty for non-frost. It's primarily a debuff, not a damage spell. So I'm going to tweak it.

Roll icy talons and the extra slowing into a single talent. This makes sense; by pulling extra heat energy, you convert the stolen energy into power for you.

Then put improved IT at rank five or deeper, and make it something like "Icy Touch gains damage equal to 12/24/36/48/60% of your weapon damage."

Unless DKs need the DPS...which seems silly...giving all of them access to a big IT seems strange.

As always, I'm just messing around here.

Anonymous said...

I don't like you... sorry to say that, but I don't like it how you talk and think you have the right to make decisons for all of us.

You talk about DW as if you are allergic to it, you try to make the DK the class you want it to be... and after all of that, you don't see how OP blood is now.

I don't like you... sorry to break the "cult" here, but your behaviour is way beyond unfair!!

Anonymous said...

That fix wouldn't help anything for DW - but why am I not surprised by that??

Making it more weapon damage based is serious crap. Let it do fixed frost-dmg and it would be better.

Anonymous said...

I have 2 issues with this:

1. Is the % value based of swing damage or pure weapon damage? I would really like to see AP factored in.

2. I know you don't like DW. But especially tanks will DW most of the time if there are no 2h Def weapons introduced and there is a big fanbase of dw dks. Perhaps change it to % damage of both weapons :)

-Saitoz-

Sam said...

Another good idea I saw was to use a really high AP conversion like blood thirst for warriors.

There are a lot of options, but if it stays the way it is now, Icy touch is really going to suck at 80 with good gear later on.

It's scaling flat out sucks.

Believer said...

I like the basic concept, although, I think 60% weapon damage might be a little high.

I like Alrenous's idea of putting an Imp. Icy Touch deeper in the tree which buffs it's damage substantially. It would make sense that IT should be a primary damage spell for Frost(which it needs). Most other specs, I imagine, will always have better uses for their runes than to spam another IT(Death Strikes for DRM for Blood and the new Scourge Strike for Unholy) so I don't see much need to buff base IT beyond what it is now: a utility spell.

Sam said...

The numbers are not what's important right now, but rather the mechanic and idea behind it.

10%, 200%, whatever. The point is, the scaling on the ability right now just flat out sucks, and hardly scales with your gear.

The numbers will be fine tuned later towards the end of the beta.

Believer said...

I agree completely.

Have the coefficients for AP -> Spell Damage for DK spells been published? Knowing what kind of benefit IT receives from AP might be helpful for coming up with a solution. If it's AP -> Spell Damage coefficient could be buffed, that might be a simpler solution. A similar solution could also help out DC, which I saw was mentioned in your post on Heart Strikes.

Anonymous said...

I'd rather the damage scale with a better AP coefficient than a % weapon damage, something about that is just counter intuitive and aesthetically displeasing for a spell.

Anonymous said...

Isn't this ability allready scaling by AP, just poorly ?
So they don't need to change the mechanics but just increase the AP scaling for this ability (since all spells are supposed to scale by your amount of AP -like DC).

I have to agree with the anons above me that a change based on weapondmg would be another slap in the face of those DKs who want to dw. (even if i personally don't like the fact that DKs are able to DW in the first place ... but since they are they shouldn't be punished any further).

Also i'm not a big fan of the idea buffing the damage of IT way too much. Ofc, it should scale but imo the intention of this ability was to put a debuff on the target and to apply frost fever (which doesn't seem to scale that bad).
With your suggestion this would just act like another instant attack like blood/plague strike and imo dk's don't need more of them since it would result in other abillities getting nerfed as soon as they start with the balancing.

Unknown said...

"Huanz said:

I know you don't like DW. But especially tanks will DW most of the time if there are no 2h Def weapons introduced and there is a big fanbase of dw dks."

I don't know how many times this has to be said before people pick up on this but dw is not the best choice for tanking. Dw will lead to the boss parrying you more often and when a mob parries it speeds up their swing speed for the next hit.

And going back to my first post if it kept its range I would be ok with these changes. I doubt they will use this idea due to the fact that they said they where going to boost the damage on it anyway but this idea could work also.

Sam said...

Saitoz, he's got a point, and a point that's been stated several times by Blizzard already in fact.

Tanking as DW probably isn't ideal, as you run into the potential of eating a bunch of RNG counter attacks via the boss parrying your faster attacks.

Just because tanking stats commonly on 1handers doesn't mean it won't be possible or even ideal to tank with 2handers. Blizzard could, in an extreme example, add a runeforge enchant that would allow you to enchant your 2h weapon with 100% parry and 100% dodge. Obviously that's not going to happen, but you get the point.

Anonymous said...

I don't like this suggestion even though I like most of yours. A range spell based off of weapon damage just doesn't work for me. However, If it were ~45% Attack Power, that would scale with gear, and still not do to much of an abundance of damage.

BTW: Posting on the forums doesnt work for me? I tried my retail account that is upgraded for the beta and my temporary account I use to log in, neither works. Any help?

Believer said...

On a separate note, I wanted to comment on your suggestion for Frost Strike as well. To quote your example rotation with your suggested changes:

"IT > PS > BS > BS > ? ?= Need to AOE CC+ Frost fever? Hungering cold. Need to heal? Death strike. Need big Single target damage? Obliterate!

RP ability at this point? Did you need to apply Aoe frost fever via hungering cold? You can howling blast now, or do it later. Single target deathcoil? IBF? Whatever!

Now you'll have 2 death, 2 frost, 2 unholy.

You can: FS (if winter's chill reapplied frost fever on frost strikes again) > PS > FS > FS > Oblit = lots of RP saved up here. End of 2nd rotation. Did you do Hungering cold earlier? If so, Howling Blast after 10s of hungering cold freeze has gone, or continue saving it. Otherwise, Deathcoil. "

I'm leaning away from your Frost Strike suggestion largely because that rotation feels too much like Blood's to be exciting to me. Blood will look to drop 4 HS's in it's second rotation. Frost, with your suggestion, would do the same thing except with Frost Strike, essentially. It's a good idea, but, I would hate for all the trees to feel homogenized.

I do like your rune suggestion for HC, though.

I like the current concept of going for Triple Obliterates on your second rotation (or including a Death Strike/Howling Blast if you want to). It would be nice to have the Frost tree feel unique in its rotation beyond simply casting a different RP spell.

I do like how the rotation flows, though. Do you think we could get a similar feel if Frost DKs were to have IT as a primary Frost rune DPS ability(somehow) and/or increase the RP generation of Obliterate?

Having a rotation like this would still be fun to me:
IT > PS > BS > BS > O/HC > (FS, DC, IBF, etc)

In the second rotation, you could do something like
O > O > O/HB(to AE smack the mobs hit by HC earlier) > (FS, DC, IBF, etc)

I think having the Opportunity Cost of giving up your other RP abilities let's FS have impressive damage at the moment. It's also the only real talent in a tree which provides a primary DPS ability as a replacement to DC. I think that's a nice change of pace.

Sorry for the full-blown article as a comment :P No beta access ftl :(

Anonymous said...

@ Parry Issue

Most hard hitting bosses in SW have parry reduction turned off or they hit so fast that it doesn't matter.

The other half is that most tanks have enough expertise to not let that happen anyways ;)

As much as i am a fan of the thought of tanking two hand, there have been no weapons till now and if you aim for the MT position you will need max avoidance / migation :)

If blizz shows me good 2h weaps I'm the first to ignore dw tanking issues ^^

-Saitoz-

Therogue said...

Well honestly does everything have to scale so well?

i mean ever playd a rogue most of our abilitys scale piss poor you know?

thats still the reason for S&D beeing the raid finishing move

Evisirate scales really bad like garrote and well rupture aint that too well either

this is the bigest reason rogues are hated alot after expa realases as evi usually does simply just Too much dmg but laiter as resiliance and armour goes up it just gets Worse

I mean my biggest evisirate crit in PvP is from lvl60 my lvl 70 crits dont go over it they are justt under by 100dmg or so

also alot of people have staited this change would jsut make it more 2handed

last time i cheacked DK are still dual wielders sure the emphazis is on 2handed but still.

and Back to rogue scalings if you have noticed most of our talents improve our finisher by 20-50% thats a LOT and still they do less dmg than some similar abilities like rupture VS corruption