World of Feedback

Anyone else enjoy this type of music?

2009-01-18T09:29:00.001-06:00

I certainly do.

Enjoy. =]

Q&A around the forums:

2008-12-01T13:57:00.003-06:00

Just thought I'd point out a couple of these posts to tide you over, as I won't be able to post for a while.

Question about Runic Power Mastery answered.

Question about Chillblains answered.

Finally, for those of you who might have some trouble with rogues, just remember this tip:

Plague strike will reapply blood plague even if a rogue has cloak of shadows up. As soon as you see a rogue cloak, try and land a new plague strike on them asap.

Plague strike, like serpent sting (which can be used by hunters to accomplish the same thing), doesn't roll a spell-based hit check, and thus isn't affected by the 90% resist rate. As long as you don't get parried/dodged, and the strike lands, the dot will be reapplied, preventing them from utilizing a lengthy vanish.

Post here.

The easiest quest there is: Onyxia

2008-11-29T06:54:00.003-06:00

Need gold? Just do this every three days. It only takes about 15 minutes from taking the portal down there, to the hearth out after you drop the beast.

It's not a bad deal, either. Vendor loot, 146 gold, and some gems/bags.

Just a few ganking clips:

2008-11-18T07:52:00.004-06:00

Though they were at or near full health, and within 1 level of me (above or below), I feel pretty overpowered against just about any opponent I run into with my current spec. I'm simply unkillable 1vs1 so far. I think only a very well-played frost mage would give me a tough fight at this point, or another DK with a similar spec.

Link.

Video link from wsg post below:

2008-11-17T12:33:00.000-06:00

Enjoy.

Deathknights in PvP:

2008-11-17T08:38:00.007-06:00

Yikes:

Just from a random wsg I was queued into in the 70-79 range. (I was 76 here)

Also something interesting to note: If you click off your Shadow of Death ghouls bug when you die and come back as a ghoul, it doesn't count as a 'death' in BGs. Probably just a bug.

In case anyone is wondering, I'm currently running this spec.

I'm just messing around with talents right now, trying to get a good feel for them on live. I'm pretty much convinced at this point that mark of blood is really only good in some 2v2 scenarios or in duels. I'm probably going to drop it, and the subsequent points required to get it, for more points in unholy.

I will be uploading the fraps footage of this BG just for kicks as well later today.

On a final note, is seems that no one on the live forums cares to hear what you have to say unless you're complaining about something. Figures.

Almost there...

2008-11-13T16:58:00.004-06:00

Er, even better: :)

Creation to 68 with 336/375 mining in 18 hours.

Early PvP spec(ulation) for talent build:

2008-11-12T17:59:00.002-06:00

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=2303021503000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000230232030022112253151223103100&glyph=031601010405

I'll probably be gravitating towards something like that. I'm not sure if ravenous dead will be worth it over outbreak, considering how fragile he is. I'm also not to keen on getting RoR due to it creating more dependency on Blood plague being on the targets. I'd rather have stronger baseline talents than have to rely on diseases being on the target due to the cleanse issue.

Leveling Spec:

2008-11-11T22:11:00.006-06:00

I'll probably be going with a template like this tomorrow.

For leveling, the self-sufficiency of blood is a must, and the mobility and pet options from unholy are equally important. I'm not really sure at this point whether Imp Rune Tap or Vendetta will be better. Rune Tap is better for elites and single pulls, while Vendetta is great for when you need or want to pull a large AOE pack. I'm probably leaning towards Rune Tap at this point, and grabbing health pots to supplement any healing I may need in addition to it and Death Strike.

From this point on, I'll probably end up fleshing out the rest of unholy for more DPS upgrades. The finisher of choice until you can get scourge strike will probably be Death Strike.

I also recommend leveling with Sword Shattering, as it's a great way to mitigate damage. Between 2% dodge, sword shattering, and 3/5 Blade Barrier, you're going to be rocking and additional 12% mitigation most of the time, which is nothing to scoff at.

If I find myself too abundant with heals and overheals, I might just end up going deep unholy and skip going for self-sufficiency for now. It's really going to depend on how the flow of combat is going to feel, as I haven't leveled a new DK in about 4 months since beta started.

I still haven't decided on a name at this point, either. Jayde is taken on Tichondrius, so I'm still debating what to name myself. (I hate special characters)

At this point, I'm thinking between these:

Deathknel
Nephilym
Impulsenine (Give all weapons cheat in quake 1)
Negativity

Ah, well.. What sounds best?

For anyone who needs the Wotlk Installer now, rather than waiting:

2008-11-11T13:31:00.003-06:00

Mostly for those of you overseas that don't have access to a midnight release store who are having someone get you a key. :)

Enjoy!

Also, if you already have your WotLK key, you can upgrade your account here.

Update: Link to the official Blizzard Downloader: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/download/clients/pc/InstallWoW.exe

Ok, I lied: One final lock idea:

2008-11-10T14:25:00.003-06:00

One of things I liked about playing a necro in EQ way back in the day, was their "lich" line of spells.

Would it be possible to see some sort of glyph or talent to change lifetap into a drain health into mana gradually over time (until cancelled), rather than having to mash the button 10,000 times a day?

Alternatively, it could also be used as a way to spice up dark pact, draining the pets mana to you over time instead.

In addition, it would also make talents such as Soul Leech more "fluid" and thus more fun to use.

Just an idea. =]

Stick a fork in the beta, 'cuz it's done.

2008-11-08T21:20:00.003-06:00

I know, old news. I've been out of town. =]

I am unable to post on the live forums, so this brings my public feedback to an end. I'm pretty sure everyone is pretty well-informed about DKs by now. My services are no longer required. =]

Hope to bump into some of you guys on live. I'll be on Bloodlust. I hope this blog helped all of you as much as it did me. Keep in touch!

For those curious about DK leveling:

2008-10-28T11:45:00.004-06:00

I just finished the entire DK quest chain again (for the billionth time), and this is to show you just how far into 57 you get before turning in the part in orgrimmar or stormwind.

Also, it takes roughly 1 hour and 30 minutes to run through these quests.

Braaaaaaaaaiinss

2008-10-26T12:50:00.002-06:00

Current DK wishlist:

2008-10-24T23:32:00.006-06:00

In light of some recent discussions regarding DK talents and mechanics, I decided to sit down and do a little bit of brainstorming to help come up with some interesting solutions to shape this class up a bit more.

Here is a brief list of some of the things I came up with, sort of as a "wish list" of changes I'd like to see happen:

Blood:

Baseline changes:

Blood strike now acts as a method to congeal or coagulate the victims blood, and melds any diseases currently afflicting the target to their flesh, making them (the diseases) temporarily undispellable until worn out or renewed.

Reason: It's easy to see why a change like this will probably be need to be made, by following this thread: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11676599681&sid=2000
This wouldn't make ALL diseases that the death knight spreads undispelable. You still have a chance to do so in pvp before blood strikes hit. In addition, diseases spread via pestilence would not be "sealed in" and undispelable until they are struck with a blood strike. This let's the DK focus on keeping a single target debuffed for the purpose of disease synergy, while not making diseases completely uncounterable.

Finally, this would actually make blood strike feel like it has an actual purpose (and one that makes sense), and be more fun and engaging to use. Abilities that have a clearly defined purpose always make for more interesting gameplay. In addition, it would give epidemic actual value in a PvP environment, as extra duration on dispelable diseases is rather underwhelming to say the least.

Edit: Perhaps the disease/blood strike change is too strong, and perhaps it isn't.

Perhaps the diseases should get harder and harder to dispel with each blood strike applied to the diseased target. Say, 35%/70% for every 1/2 blood strikes. This, combined with virulence, would give 100% undispelable, but ONLY on targets that you've performed blood strike on twice.

I really like the idea of blood strike causing the targets' blood to coagulate when diseased, though.

Talent changes:

Scent of blood: In adition to it's current effects, it now also reduces the RP cost of all offensive RP abilities by 5/10/15%.

Reason: Many people do not like this talent simply because it's only useful for tanking, where RP abilities aren't as huge of a concern as maintaining rune rotations. This would allow people to get use out of the talent even when not taking hits, while at the same time making things like hungering cold, DRW, gargoyle, death coil, and unholy blight easier to squeeze in for any situation.

Vendetta: In additon to it's current effects, Vendetta now also gives the DK a 10% damage boost for 20 seconds if their ghoul is prematurely slain in battle.

Reason: The idea here is to spice up this talent a bit, while at the same time encouraging players to bust the ghoul out even in environments where it might get killed off via AOE pretty easily, as blood DKs have no way of resummoning a ghoul very quickly. You must avenge poor Brainsnatcher. :)

Frost:

Baseline changes:

Horn of winter now lasts 5 minutes, but now costs 30 RP. Please.

Talent changes:

Glacier rot and Endless winter have swapped places.

Reason: This one is pretty obvious. Glacier rot does nothing for deep blood and deep unholy specs. Endless winter, on the other hand, would be a great talent that any sub-spec would be interested in picking up, including any build interested in PvP. This, combined with the blood strike baseline change would go to solve a lot of mechanical issues players are having with fighting the DK resource system. Chains of ice is still dispelable, so I don't see this as being OP.

Killing Machine: KM procs now also automatically refresh the duration of Horn of Winter.

Reason: Quality of life issue that would be a perk to frost. Frost is more RP hungry than any other tree, and would benefit more from this change than blood or unholy.

Unholy:

Talent changes:

Anticipation: Now also reduces the RP cost of your Rune Strike by 25/50%.

Reason: This is the only early tanking talent that we get that doesn't offer an ancillary effect that's beneficial in PvP. Blade barrier has the side effect of not only providing 10% physical mitigation, but also increases the proc chance of rune strike by 10%. Tougness increases armor, but also reduces snare effects. Anticipation is just a flat 5% dodge. Useful, but not exciting. This change would allow DKs who enjoy both PvE and PvP a reason to be excited about picking up a tanking talent, and not feeling "bad" about it when not tanking.

Corpse Explosion: Additional effect: Targets affected by corpse explosion are now dazed for 8 seconds, and take an additional 10% shadow damage while dazed. In addition, all diseases on affected targets are now refreshed to their maximum duration.

Reason: The idea here is that players don't like weaving CE into their rotations, not because of the damage it does or doesn't do, but because it costs players an unholy rune that could/should be used to refresh desecration instead. It simply doesn't "do" enough or warrant enough reason for use. If CE dazed targets and increased the shadow damage they take, you'd somewhat make up for the loss of a desecration on your next rotation, feel rewarded for using CE (which is VERY situational at best anyways), and would make players actually look forward to using the ability. In addition, refreshing the diseases on affected targets means that using CE creates the opportunity of using blood boil more, which encourages picking up talents such as outbreak and reaping. This would be a great synergy change, and rightfully so, as again it's a very situational ability at best.

Unholy Blight: Additional Effect: Now heals the Death knight for 50% of the damage done.

Reason: Simply put? Flavor.

If you want more reasons, follow these posts: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11829574034&sid=2000#7 & http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11693920086&postId=118283298100&sid=2000#61

DK mechanics too clunky for PvP?

2008-10-23T03:17:00.004-06:00

Post.

Edit: Follow up post.

Blizzard games have always traditionally been about the "Easy to play, hard to master" mentality. Unfortunately, I don't think the DK quite falls into the "easy to play" part just yet.

It is a rather complicated class, and the mechanics can get a little clunky sometimes when things don't quite fall into place. It can be a lot of work for a new DK to not only learn how to manage multiple resources instead of one like they're probably used to, but to also be required to do their moves in specific orders, so as to get the most bang for their GCD spent.

Is that a good thing? For the sake of keeping things interesting, I suppose. But from a competitive standpoint, I'm not so sure. I'll give examples of why down below.

If you were to ask me (and I'm probably going to catch a ton of flak for saying this), I would suspect that the single biggest culprit of the challenge of playing the class properly, is the over-dependence of having diseases up on the target to do maximum damage with most of your strikes. It's a cool mechanic, until you start running into situations where rotations simply aren't feasable (I'm looking mostly at pvp here).

I have this suspicion that, if anything, this is the department that will probably need to be looked at going into the future, if things prove too difficult or DK DPS is too inconsistent depending on the opponents they face.

One example of a class that was probably too hard to play well in TBC (if you chose to forgo the way of mods, macros and a G15 keyboard), was the hunter. Not only were they arguably the most difficult class to play well in the arena for a myriad of reasons, but they were also the most difficult class to properly DPS with in raids. One tiny, simply fix to alleviate their huge learning curve, was to remove auto shot clipping. Bam, much easier to play, and now will also be easier to dish out the damage in pvp without worrying about clipping shots while you're constantly repositioning yourself.

Also, try to sit back for a second and imagine for a second if rogue DPS strikes like Sinister strike and Hemo (or even eviscerate), were balanced around the assumption that to do max damage, you HAD to have some sort of deadly or other poison up at all times, otherwise you'd take a pretty huge DPS hit. On top of keeping up SnD, managing combo points, possible positional requirements, cooldowns, and keeping enough energy in reserves to kick/etc, you'd also cringe everytime your poisons got cleansed.

Not only would rogues be frustrated that their "MS" and snare poisons would fall off, but their hemo/SS damage would be less as well.

Fortunately for rogues, this isn't the case. They can do all their high damage moves without worrying about this, with the exception of mutliate. However, as in mutliate's case, it isn't so bad, since Assassination specs have typically have their target poisoned the vast majority of the time, if not by auto attacks alone, but also easy access to shiv which is essentially on demand, and doesn't run them the risk of screwing up any "rotations".

I guess what I'm trying to say is, is that I probably wouldn't rule out the possibility that DKs might end up needing some sort of disease dependency rework in the future. Would it dumb things down? Yeah, but if Blizzard has learned anything from TBC PvP, it should have been that overly complex classes that take more effort to play well fight an uphill battle against classes that are at least as effective with far less effort.

That, and I guess I'm trying to say that our strikes and abilities should provide strong incentive to use on their own, and not require us to use X, Y abilities before we can even think about using ability Z. If anything comes along to screw up that pattern, then everything gets a little out of whack, and the whole process just feels very much out of place. Whenever that happens, I always sit there and think to myself, "Well Gee, do I just start my whole rotation over because A) My disease got cleansed, or B) I had to use chains of ice instead of apply frost fever via icy touch? Or do I just go ahead and blow a 1F1U ability that does subpar damage?" It's a double whammy. Not only is our utility/damaging disease removed, but our subsequent strike damage that would have followed suite also do less damage unless those diseases are reapplied.

It's... frustrating, to say the least. While learning how to pvp with this class, I'd often run into situations like the above stated, and just try and figure out in my head if it's worth it to just spam disease applicators and get as many quick strikes in? Or just forget about keeping diseases up and try to get those hard hitters off anyways, even if they do less damage.

After a while, I started to go with the second option, but even then, that doesn't work with an ability like howling blast, as it's damage is absolutely laughable without frost fever up. It struck me odd that what was once an excellent burst ability has now become a real pain to get working right in a competitive PvP environment.

I don't want to sit here and go into the frustrations I have with each individual strike or ability that suffers from this problem, as you can probably see where I'm going with this anyway. I just wanted to bring up the overall point that I'm trying to make, which is that the heavy disease dependencies are more frustrating than fun in pvp, and that our "rotations" don't apply themselves well in pvp, once we start needing to apply chains of ice as often as is required.

Warlock Destro Suggestion:

2008-10-21T11:42:00.001-06:00

So I was reviewing the destro changes for locks lately after the ruin/devastation change, and did some thinking.

It seems that PVE locks are just fine with ruin being a 5 point talent, as it helps with their stat (crit) scaling for raids. It's a better 5 point investment as an 11-15 point talent sink than just 5% crit (which is the current 21 pointer). This leads me to believe that, assuming most people will end up going at least 51 demo or 51 affliction before going destro, that the current 21 pointer in destro could stand to be changed to help destro warlocks where they need it most right now: PvP viability.

So my idea is to basically get rid of the 5% crit talent, melt that lost DPS elsewhere into the tree, and replace it with something that would actually change a warlocks playstyle.

You wanted to give warlocks a different type of CC and make them less reliant on fear. That was the whole idea for introducing cripple, was it not? Well, why not give destro warlocks a chance at squeezing some sort of new CC in that would solve some of their issues (mobility and survivability), but NOT reintroduce cripple.

The first thing that came to mind was aflame wreath type ability, similar to the Shade of Aran in Karazhan, even if only a single target version with a moderate (30s or so) cooldown. Think chains of ice that locks you into place for a short duration via chains of fire, preventing movement for 2 seconds, but allows you to move after that, at your own risk: Any target who attempts to move out of the wreath explodes, dealing damage to all around them, and also burns away Y resources (lose a bit of rage/energy/RP/mana). I think that could be pretty cool.

To make up for the loss of 5% crit via devastation, you can simply melt that into the tree elsewhere.

The only other thing I was thinking of, was introducing a new "armor" for locks, to match more of a destro play-style.

Mages have Molten armor for fire specs, frost armor for frost, and mage armor for arcane (although the other armors can still be useful for arcane, too).

Warlocks basically have a PVE armor and a PvP armor... And to be honest: I really don't like demon armor at all unless I know I'll be catching a ton of heals. The 2% health regen and extra spell power is clearly superior for double DPS 2s, triple DPS 3s, and any small scale combat when you're not being followed/spam healed by a pocket healer, and/or being focused. When I do BGs, I almost always prefer fel armor.

I really think Demon armor could use a little boost, either with the physical damage duration reductions, or something along those lines. I at least think Demon armor needs to have it's flat armor increase # scale with another stat, such as spell power.

Alpha Nostolgia Pictures:

2008-10-21T11:00:00.003-06:00

Hunter Explosive Shot Feedback:

2008-10-19T00:29:00.000-06:00

Post.

Explosive shot seems to have been over-nerfed, simply because it was (like many other talents introduced this expansion) trying to do too many cool things at once, and was summarily nerfed pretty badly.

I don't really see how it was balanced to have an arcane shot that ticked in an AOE that did 3x the damage of arcane shot per GCD used. It was high damage move that could be used completely on the move. The result? It obviously got nerfed.

I think that the main issue with explosive shot, from my perspective, is that it was trying to replace the wrong skill to give hunters that big damage boost. Hunters already have mobile damage. Since when do they need (massive) mobile AOE damage? And if they do (for pve), how is big mobile AOE damage balanced for PVP? It would be like giving mages instant cast targetable flame strikes and arcane explosions. The answer: It isn't, and wasn't. The result? Now you have a weak damage component, but keep the mobility factor as an instant shot.

Instead, I see myself wanting explosive shot to do nice, big damage, but at a cost: Mobility. Why isn't explosive shot a replacement for steady shot instead? Reinstate it's damage, but give it a cast time, not much different from having to cast shadowbolts and fireballs. If it had a cast time, the devs could afford to bump it's damage back up quite considerably, as well as sever the shared cooldown between it and arcane shot.

Chew on that in your mind and try to visualize how that would play out.

Necrosis, pvp burst, unholy presence, etc:

2008-10-18T22:57:00.000-06:00

Post.

The thing I hate about necrosis, is that it only really boosts white damage, which is unappealing to me for two main (PvE and PvP) reasons:

1) Auto attacking things to death isn't fun (which is why I personally hated the retadin playstyle prior to WotLK), and talents that boost that type of mechanic I look down upon. Mechanics that exist simply to boost white damage hold very little appeal to any DK not planning on dual wielding. This is directly contradictory to staple, spec-defining talents that you get later in the tree, such as scourge strike, which screams 2hander.

2) In PvP, talents that focus mainly on boosting auto attack damage aren't highly sought after at all, unless those same talents also boost instant strike damage as well. A good example would be dual wield spec for rogues. By itself, it's fairly unappealing to rogues that care about what matters in pvp: Burst damage. Where it DOES become appealing, is how it affects mutilate burst damage. That extra burst damage coming from your offhand dagger on this big crit mutilates is a huge attraction for pvpers. Necrosis does nothing of the sort. It's a small, flat boost of white damage. That's it. It's an interesting concept, but doesn't really change the way a deathknight will use his or her active abilities, and thus I consider it to be a rather boring talent.

To along with this, look at a different example of how this affected another class:

BM hunters were, by far, the most damaging spec they could be: In PvE. Why? Because a lot of their damage was off GCD via the pet, and they had a very balanced shot rotation via steady-auto rotations. However, to do this sort of rotation, you essentially had to sacrifice ALL mobility, as steady shot is a "cast time" ability, meaning you can't move while you use it.

So, what was the supreme "DPS" spec in pve, failed miserably in Competitive PvP (arena), turned out to be pretty bad when mobility and burst is suddenly king. Marks was their best bet, since it relied heavily on front-loaded damage, and you could reposition yourself between front-loaded burst cooldowns, or use that time to drop traps, wingclip and reposition, etc.

Now, given that context, I also feel that our "pvp presence" of unholy presence fails to make up for the loss of damage gained in blood presence, since Auto attack damage is NOT an acceptable replacement for 15% overall damage lost. You could argue that the extra 7% movement speed of being in unholy presence vs having some sort of run speed enchant could somehow theoretically make up for whatever the increased auto attack damage doesn't cover, but I doubt it. Though, I cannot prove this point at this time.

Necrosis falls in the same category, and will probably end up being regulated into a pure pve spec, and probably only for dual-wield specs.

Hungering Cold Love:

2008-10-18T02:54:00.000-06:00

I still think hungering cold could benefit from a new, additional mechanic to give it more flavor in more situations.

Hungering cold doesn't always feel rewarding to use in the situations you'd want to use it. I think part of the problem stems from the fact that it not only doesn't provide a DPS increase at all, but actually hurts your dps by consuming RP that could have been used on frost strikes instead.

A pvper can sometimes look past the above issue due to the fact that it's essentially our only real CC option. At the very least, it can force a trinket or two. Sadly, I think that is the role that it will be dwindled down to in PvP.

But Jayde! You can potentially hit 5 targets with it at once in a 5v5! Yeah, and if you manage to hit all five of your opponents with it, since it's a PBAOE, you're probably fighting people that are extremely bad and have no real sense of positioning.

As a matter of fact, as arena fights become more and more scripted, it will become very apparent that you're fighting a frost death knight (chains applying frost fever is a dead giveaway), and all it takes is a little coordination for your healer to stay away from the DK or DPSer so as to not eat a HC. Going with this, as these fights get more scripted in the arena, it will become painfully obvious when a death knight is going to want to use hungering cold, much in the same way that you know that you'll eat a blind as soon as you trinket X move, or you'll eat a hasty follow-up fear or deathcoil into a fear as soon as the first fear is trinketed. The problem with this scenario? The death knight has to run, or crawl, over to the target they want to CC, which is more than likely NOT going to be the target that they have been DPSing, who's going to typically have more then just disease debuffs on them in any group environment.

Hungering cold as a pvp-only ability certainly has it's flaws, as you can see. I haven't even mentioned just how expensive it is to use as a "snap" ability, because at this point it doesn't really matter.

Here are the issues with hungering cold:

1) It's only usable on trash in PVE. Great, but other people in the group are going to be doing CC already, as is. Besides, if you need HC to clear an instance, then the instance probably needs to be retuned. Not to mention, if you need HC to do every pull, then the one minute cooldown becomes a thorn in everyone's side. An ability that really only helps on trash is far from exciting, at least for me, for a 51 pointer.

2) It's very, very situational in pvp, and will have counters as people learn how to effectively CC/control DKs from getting it off at key moments. Yes, you might be surprising people in the arena right now with it, since they probably A) don't expect it, or B) Don't know what they're fighting against. I promise you, this won't last. It isn't really that difficult to avoid if you're a smart player.

3) It's a very large drain on resources, without actually providing a boost in damage. This is because it provides an element of CC. However, given the two points stated above, this isn't a very good trade off at the moment.

Now here comes the inevitable part where I toss some ham-handed suggestion(s) out. Get ready to cringe!

I have a few thoughts towards this talent, some of which I've held since the beginning of alpha.

1) I've always wanted it to provide an additional debuff of some sort, that is unique to the talent, and not simple be an additional way to spread frost fever. That's pestilences job. I don't want a 51 pointer that basically does the same thing. Pestilence should have always spread FF to unlimited targets, and now that it does, this point needs to be reevaluated. There are many ideas to go with this, such as :

A) Increasing the affected targets susceptibility to being crit. They are thawing out, thus might share some of the similar portions of being weak to "shatter" type combos.
B) Provide an additional "slow" effect for people that are thawing out from the freeze portion of the spell, even after the freeze wears off, similar to an AOE chains of ice
C) The lazy way: Increase the amount of damage affected targets take for X seconds by Y%. Let this debuff work even on bosses, so that it would give us an excuse to be usable on bosses, or on targets that we are DPSing in pvp if we optimal CC positioning simply isn't an option.

2) The only other thing that I've tossed around in my mind about HC, was that perhaps it's just not fit for a 51 point talent, but for a 31 point instead. Going with this, people would be more psyched about going 51 + frost if their 51 pointer was a nice damage ability. My suggestion would probably be to potentially swap howling blast (and increasing it's damage to make it feel more like a 51 pointer), and making HC the 31 pointer.

Why? How many people actually only go 31 deep in frost for howling blast, and then go down another tree? I'd argue slim-to-none. That's because to make Howling blast good, you really have to press on deep further down the tree to make it arguably worth using. Going 31 deep to HB doesn't really do much, at least not the same way you can go down 31 into arms and get MS. MS starts hitting hard for warriors at 31 points in. Howling blast doesn't start hitting "hard" until you're down to around GoG, Tundra stalker levels. This is beside the fact that you need blood of the north to get the most out of it in rotations.

Even then, howling blast takes arguably more "prep work" than any other talent we have. You've gotta get frost fever up, spread it around via pestilence, and then do it as a 1F1U ability. It's the added requirement of pestilence that really makes howling blast feel awkward. It's damage is very lackluster compared to oblit on single targets every single time. It actually feels like our most expensive ability to use. It requires, at the very minimum, 4 runes to use optimally, and I say optimally because any time you are on a single target, you simply won't even think about using HB. Frost fever not up first? Don't even think about using howling blast. In an AOE? Yeah, you can get by with not using pestilence, but why would you? The damage difference is so significant on the off targets if they don't have frost fever up first, that you absolutely feel compelled to use pestilence first.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if I had it my way, I'd like to see:

1) Howling blast and Hungering cold swap places
2) Howling blast have the FF dependency completely dropped, and do frost-fever type damage all the time. Even with frost fever up, it's still less damage than oblit on single targets. I suppose I'm ok with that, but if it becomes a 51 pointer, I'd actually rather see HB become the better choice between the two for single target damage.

Why? Because oblit has nice crit chance via rime and subversion. It's a "spikier" move to use. Howling Blast is also riskier to use in situations where breaking CC isn't the best option. You have to make a choice, based on player skill, as to when howling blast would be best used over obliterate, even if HB did more damage.

Also, sorry I haven't been posting much lately. Been extremely busy. :)

Edit: Typos and such. It's late. :(

For those of you who haven't seen the finale DK mission:

2008-10-15T00:34:00.001-06:00

Enjoy.

Warlock Idea:

2008-10-07T12:26:00.002-06:00

I posted this on the forums here.

Demon armor: Now also reduces the duration of physical effects on the caster by 30%.

What does this include? Here's a short list:

Cheap shot
Kidney shot
Intercept stun
Pounce
Bash
Maim
Gouge
Blind
Sap
Deadly throw snare
Hamstring
Wing clip
Mortal Strike
Aimed shot
Garrote (both the silence and the dot)
Rupture
Expose armor
Sunder armor
Piercing howl

I'm not too worried about diseases, dots, and rogue poisons, simply because it's possible to cleanse or remove them in some form or fashion. They have counters. The abilities above, however, do not. Most classes can deal with the abilities listed above for various reasons. Warlocks, on the other hand, seem to be designed around the fact that they are best dealt with by having melee sit on top of them the whole fight.

Making fel armor and demon armor undispelable was a good start, but it might be necessary going forward to give demon armor even more passive defense against effects that they really have no other way of getting rid of.

If you're going to design warlock abilities based on the assumption that they are meant to "tank" melee in pvp, then you will probably find that they will need a buff to core abilities and mechanics to help them fulfill this role. This would also make demonic aegis a lot more attractive.

In addition:

I'd really like to see Demon Armor's armor value scale off of another stat, such as spell power. I.e. static number + 20% of spell power or something along those lines.

I don't think it would be a good idea to scale the armor value off of another defensive stat, such as resilience or stamina. I'd hate to see encouraging locks to be competitive by simply stacking a bunch of defensive stats. It's ultimately less fun in the long run, and fun is what the game is all about.

Team Fortress 2 Analysis (not wow related. please ignore for now)

2008-10-05T02:08:00.062-06:00

Last year, Valve dropped a bombshell on the first-person shooter market with their latest and greatest hit: Team Fortress 2.

"TF2", as it's commonly known by its many adoring fans around the world, is the much anticipated sequel to a very popular quake 1 mod (or modification), aptly known as Team Fortress. Many of TF2's features, mechanics, and team-based gameplay goals reflect the original in several ways.

Gameplay:

Much like the original Team Fortress, TF2 is focused on two competing teams fighting over goals or objectives that vary depending on the map currently in rotation. These vary from capture-and-hold control point style objectives, to the more classic capture-the-flag (Team Fortress 2 uses "intelligence" instead of flags). More recently, Valve has introduced several new gameplay objective modes. One of these revolves around one team pushing a hilariously designed "bomb cart" with comical writings on the front, while the defending team does all they can to prevent the attackers from reaching their checkpoints with said cart.

Players can choose between one of nine classes to play at any given time, and barring any server-side restrictions, have the option to change their current class at any time. To do this, they must return to the starting safe-zone. Each class has their own strengths and weaknesses, and some create wonderful synergies with each other, such as the Heavy and the Medic. It's a sort of rock-paper-scissors approach to class balance that, when combined with the ability to change classes relatively often, can create a very fun and dynamic combat flow with classes being introduced to counter others non-stop. More advanced players will often find that simply sticking with the same class will put them at a disadvantage, as the opposing team will react to this by simply choosing the counter class(es). This is a great way to prevent player burnout; by simply offering many different roles for you to play at any given time. Using this method, Valve manages to keep the gameplay fresh without actually changing the game. This gives each scenario a large amount of replay value, because you never end up playing a map the same way twice.

Classes:

There are nine different classes for players to choose from. In no specific order, they are: The Soldier, The Pyro, The Demoman, The Sniper, The Spy, The Heavy, The Medic, The Engineer, and The Scout.

The broad selection of classes and roles to assume really opens up many different playstyles that players can use to reach their objectives.

For example: A player with steady aim might find themselves best suited to suppress the advancing forces with well-placed sniper fire, while another might find it more suitable to sneak behind the enemy lines and backstab all of the attackers with the spy instead.

A more strategic player might find themselves thoroughly enjoying the engineer, as he can lay down tactical placements of deadly auto-aiming turrets, as well as teleporter pads for teammates to use, and places to heal up and restock supplies. Meanwhile, a more bloodthirsty friend (or foe) might enjoy getting behind the mini chaingun of the heavy, lumbering slowly towards their foes, and ripping their enemies to shreds.

Design Fun and Flaws:

All in all, the game is a lot of fun. There is a very strong emphasis on teamwork in TF2, which means that there's really nothing better than getting a few buddies together and jumping on a server and simply wreaking havoc wherever you go. Few things are more satisfying than exercising a concerted effort to render an opposing teams' defenses useless with deadly precision. The gameplay possibilities are seemingly endless, because you never really know just what's going to be around the corner.

Albeit few and far between, there are some frustrating things about the game. For starters, the game can feel awfully frustrating for a player who joins up on a server by himself where people aren't playing very well as a team. When you have a game that strongly emphasizes teamwork, and your team isn't working together, it's very easy to find yourself running into counter classes that eat you for lunch, or sacrificing yourself for the team only to see them go the other way. This game is really meant to be played with well-coordinated teammates, and not doing so will often lead to frustration.

Another flaw would be the fact that the game simply does not allow the ability to inflict damage on your teammates. While this would normally be a good approach to prevent griefing, it greatly diminishes the viability for one of the nine classes in TF2, the spy. The spy's role is to cloak past the front lines, and disguise themselves as enemy players. Thus, a common tactic is to shoot any suspicious looking teammate, just to make sure it isn't a lurking spy. This can cause endless frustration for players learning how to pick up the spy class, simply because your enemies will shoot anyone, friend or foe, before you even have the chance to do your job. When punishment for friendly fire is removed in the name of grief prevention, you also encourage the enemy to shoot at any teammate they can, since there's absolutely no detriment for doing so. I find it difficult to view this game as being truly competitive on the same level that Counterstrike or Quake ever was, simply because you're rewarded for bad gameplay (shooting at your teammates). In addition, sometimes it's just nice to have the ability to put your teammates in their place.

From a design standpoint, the game is almost perfect. It keeps people entertained for hours on end, and is packed full of comical flavor. Valve's art direction and design is unique for an FPS game, although it bears some resemblance to the older but popular "No one lives forever" PC spy game. Valve has put a tremendous amount of effort into bringing each of the nine character classes to life with their own unique, and very well done voice-overs. Combined with the wonderful, cartoony art direction inspired by the likes of Norman Rockwell, Valve has created a near flawless rendition of what is likely to remain one of the most popular team-based FPS games of all time.

Lack of updates again:

2008-10-04T11:24:00.002-06:00

Things are starting to slow down for me in the feedback department. I know I haven't been around to post much in the past week or so, but I've been really busy with some important things that have cropped up lately. Blizzcon is fast approaching, and I have a few things to take care of before I go.

If all goes well, I may be moving to California soon. =]

Tanking mitigation thoughts:

2008-09-30T11:34:00.000-06:00

What do you guys think?

IBF is both a blessing and a curse, although it is a far cry better than what it was in alpha (45% armor increase and stun immunity). However, it has since created nothing but problems for both us, and other classes.

It's a blessing in that it's essentially shield wall on a 1 minute cooldown that also grants stun immunity for a dirt cheap RP cost.

It's a curse because our total mitigation package seems to be balanced that it's used almost every time it cools down, which as many have pointed out, is not always ideal.

Emergency cooldowns should be for emergencies. From what I have seen from other people's math and theorycrafting on these forums, however, it seems that IBF is not balanced as an emergency button, but part of our total mitigation package.

It's a great cooldown, for sure. I just seem to be gathering that most people would rather have a flat damage reduction increase across the board at the cost of IBF mitigation, making damage intake less spikey as a whole.

And to be honest, I'd almost argue that IBF is probably too good in PvP as well, as Zeth and myself have pointed out on a few occasions. The fact that we had a 15S cooldown AMS (plus access to 1 min IBF), both of which could be used for extreme magic damage mitigation, made us pretty OP in PvP. I believe the wrong step was taken to correct this, without first properly addressing the PvE side of the issue.

I'd argue that IBF should probably go back to being a less essential, less game-breakingly good ability on such an OP cooldown (where it's only really OP in PvP). IBF needs to be toned down, base mitigation needs to come up (probably in frost presence), and AMS needs to be available more often.

Perhaps I'm alone on this, but I believe it's not good for the class as a whole to leave IBF as it currently stands. I'd rather see it going back to being a big armor increase + stun immunity, and drastically drop the cooldown of AMS for magic damage mitigation (which is more fun to use anyways, as well as what we need more of in PvP). Then, I would argue that in frost presence, our base mitigation of armor and magic damage mitigation needs to be raised by 10%.

The problem is IBF doing too much, too often. This hurts the dev's ability to balance our minimum mitigation without making us OP tanks in PvE with an IBF on a 1 minute cooldown. It also makes balancing our mitigation in PvP hard, since IBF steps on the toes of the role of AMS to a large degree, as it also provides a ton of magic damage mitigation. Shouldn't we have one cooldown for mitigating physical damage for emergencies, and another for magical mitigation? To compensate for the loss of the 1 minute shield wall, reinstate it to what it used to do, and provide high levels of physical mitigation via increased armor (and parry + dodge for use with the new rune strike?) + stun immunity. Raise the base mitigation via armor another 10% or so. Remember. We cannot block. It should be OK that our armor is higher than warriors. It shouldn't be a nightmare for healers to heal DKs through extremely spikey damage. Base mitigation is key. IBF as it currently stands is ruining this for us.

AMS needs to have it's cooldown brought down significantly (20-25s), as well as possibly reducing the damage it absorbs to around 50% or so untalented. In addition, our base magic mitigation in frost presence needs to be raised another 10% to make up for the loss of mitigation on IBF.

Thus, we'd have better PvP balance, and be more viable PvE tanks as well.

If anyone disagrees, please feel free to say why.

Is unholy still too good? Probably.

2008-09-29T09:46:00.002-06:00

Post.

Q u o t e:
I play (amongst other classes) a hunter & this is the class I have raided for most of BC with. Obvious similarities aside I can't help but feel that Unholy is to DKs what BM was to Hunters - the superior spec for most situations.

The testing I've done has shown that Unholy does better DPS for levelling - better DPS for instancing, arguably more powerful in PvP, too. It has less healing capability than Blood certainly but DS does good enough for me that downtime is not an issue. Unholy gives exceptionally superior AoE DPS - primarily through talents like wandering plague - but this is the only class/spec (other than prot paladin) where I've noticed my DPS rise substantially if I deliberately pull more than 1 mob - and climb quite fast the more mobs are added.

I'll freely admit that I tend to min/max somewhat but unholy really does just seem much further ahead in just about every aspect of the game - so my questions are these:

Is there any outstanding benefit to speccing anything else other than an unholy?
Do other specs (primary focus either blood/frost) start to catch up to unholy at 80?

I'd like to note that I'm not asking or suggesting that unholy be nerfed & I understand that heart strike isn't doing the damage it should be. I'm just finding a moderate disparity between unholy in any situation (PvP/PvE instancing/soloing) and either other spec.

All valid concerns.

Unholy seems to have quite the monopoly still on most major aspects of the game. As far as tanking goes, it's quite clear that bone shield is technically superior to it's counter parts in just about every way possible, save for the possible exception of vampiric blood in pvp with a druid rolling hots on you constantly.

Unholy also seems to have the best abilities for scaling towards large encounters, as well as good single target threat (damage).

Unholy has access to AMZ, which now with it's new scaling mechanic, will probably be seen as the superior raid AOE magic damage mitigation tool when compared to acclimation, as acclimation no longer seems to stack with frost aura, and is too RNG-based for most to appreciate (self included).

Desecration fills the role of providing a very handy "frost trap on demand" for pvp scenarios, as well as keeping a tight leash on mobs, which again lends itself very well to multi-mob tanking and AOE scenarios.

I'm also troubled that a passive talent such as wandering plague can keep up with damage/threat scaling in multi-mob scenarios about as well as the damage frost DKs gain via speccing into howling blast, which is an active 1F1U ability. Clearly this means that howling blast should be doing more damage than it is, considering it costs so many runes to use effectively.

In addition, it seems that scourge strike is also the most spammable single-target big hitter any spec gets, as you can squeeze in 3 scourge strikes per rotation, thanks to epidemic rotations. Not only is it the most spammable, but scourge strike (thanks to all the synergies of the tree) is also the hardest hitting 1F1U ability any single tree gets. This fact requires the use of the cinderglacier rune forge, however.

To top all of this off, unholy also has virulence and unholy command, both of which seem as required for pvp as things like vile poisons, improved stings, and improved intercept (on live right now). Death grip is too good to not talent a lower cooldown, and our disease dependency screams getting virulence against 3 out of the 4 healers (which any team is almost surely to have at least one of). And again, let's not forget how valuable desecration is now that chains is dispelable.

TLDR version: Unholy has the best AOE damage/threat via mostly passive or easy-to-use abilities such as unholy blight (which is great for spreading Ebon Plague, which makes all the other AOE abilities scream in joys of synergy). Unholy also enjoys access to the best on-demand physical AND magical mitigation tools in the form of bone shield, magic suppression, and AMZ, in addition to our highest damage single target hitter. Unholy also enjoys the monopoly on some of our best pvp talents.

PvP feedback on the changes (nerfs):

2008-09-26T15:36:00.002-06:00

As far as chains goes, it's just a little bit frustrating having both dispels and freedom counter the snare, and without putting 1 point into chillblains, I can't cover the snare with other debuffs the way frost mages can cover nova/sheeps with winters chill, locks can cover fears with more dots, rogues can cover one poison with another, etc.

There were essentially 3 things that really made chains of ice really strong:

1. Undispelable.
2. Incredible range for an instant root/snare.
3. The amount it snares (as it's technically a root at first without DR)

When you combine them, it's over the top. I'm guessing because if you went with changing either point 2 or 3, you'd end up with just another hamstring, which is effective, but boring. Class homogenization sucks, but then again, so does getting kited. I hope this isn't going to be the final implementation.

Perhaps our PvP gloves should probably updated with a new bonus. Perhaps one that grants either an additional cooldown reduction on death grip (which is incredibly good when combined with chains), or a buff to the undispelable chance for chains instead.

A five second reduction off a 2 minute cooldown on strangulate (which is a nerf that I think was a bit overdone) has suddenly lost a lot of appeal. :)

Also, I feel like AMS is just another psuedo Cloak of Shadows now. The thing about AMS was that it was great to use to absorb damage, which filled RP, which could then be used for different purposes.

Can we just get the immunity to CC effects removed, and have the cooldown significantly lowered? I don't want to be immune to magic classes, but merely take less damage from them. Being immune to binary spells is what realy made the ability stupid. I'd be more than OK at this point if I could simply get feared/polied when it's up.

Using AMS to negate damage in pvp and pve was cool, especially when it had this neat mechanic that let you charge RP while getting kited by someone nuking you. Even if you lowered the amount that it absorbed, that would be fine. A 1 minute cooldown AMS feels pretty gimmicky right now, and it really takes a lot of the fun factor out. Make it less effective than before, but available more often.

It's a fun ability, but no one wants it to be overpowered (especially non DKs), and DKs want to actually be able to use it.

I don't think AMS should make DKs immune to CC and damage (or mitigate most of it) at the same time.

Look at zerker rage for warriors. Fear immunity every for 1/3 of the match, at least. Can you imagine how people would feel if it made you immune to both fear AND an entire line of damage (magical or physical)? People would be saying the same thing about zerker rage if it was like that. You can't have both. It's just not fair or balanced.

It really needs to be one or the other, and being immune or having high mitigation to magical CC just doesn't translate as well to PvE, nor does it work well with that whole 'absorb-damage-to-charge-RP' thing.

Completely not wow related at all, but:

2008-09-25T19:35:00.003-06:00

If anyone's wondering what's really going on with the U.S.'s economy right now, you might start looking here.

I sincerely hope anyone who even remotely cares to watch it. You even might learn a thing or two.

Latest build thoughts:

2008-09-25T11:03:00.000-06:00

I had time to mess around with the changes a bit last night, and I wanted to bring up a few things. Some of these things have been around and still need looking at.

Blood:

Subversion: Now that blood strike has seen more love (and obliterate will soon, if I'm not mistaken), this is an even better talent.

Scent of blood: still only works against melee and ranged, and not against application of spells. Now that AMS cooldown has been pushed back considerably (which I often used for RP generation vs spells), is it possible to have this affect spell applications as well? Would this talent be overpowered if it procced off of auto attack damage as well? It's pretty useless right now if you're on the offense and noone is hitting you back.

Vendetta: One of the best grinding talents we have, but ultimately useless at 80. Unholy has necrosis for auto attack damage. Can't this provide an ancilary benefit via additional lifeleech via auto attacks only, or something else to make it more attractive at end game?

Blood aura: Out of the 3 auras, this one is the most underwhelming. 2% healing sounds nice, but it isn't exactly going to keep your rogues alive and topped off through AOE damage in raids and such. Also consider that unlike frost and unholy aura, not everyone in your raid will even really benefit from this aura. It only helps those that are dealing damage. Frost and Unholy aura, on the other hand, help everyone. Please consider buffing this talent.

2 Handed Weapon Spec: Very similar to the warrior talent, but ultimately not as useful per point spent. Why? Because a lot of our damage, even if using 2 handed weaponry, does not come from strikes (even as blood spec). A lot of our damage also comes from diseases, icy touch, deathcoils, a ghoul, or other abilities if going down another tree. Initially looks attractive for frost strike users, but ultimately turns out to be under-budgeted for that type of build due to so much of deep frost/unholy's damage coming from non-strike damage. Could be deeper in a bit for more emphasis on blood builds, or buffed a hair.

Death Rune Mastery: Great talent! I like this one a lot. It's good for just about any build, really. The death rune concept, while useful in altering rotations in pve, is probably 4x more useful for pvp uses and applications. Being able to switch your rune config around to allow for using chains of ice x4, or multiple blood strikes, blood boils, etc is insanely useful in any scenario that doesn't allow for standard rotations to be used (PvP). I am heavily biased to pick up any death rune talents in pvp builds for that reason alone. If I had any wish, it would be to have DRM switch places with 2H weapon spec in the blood tree, making this death rune talent easier to access for something like frost (which also uses heavy amounts of obliterate). In addition, it isn't rare for unholy users to death strike, and any unholy pvper would benefit greatly from this talent as well.

Strangulate: 2 minute cooldown? I get one ranged silence, maybe two per fight now. This makes using it more skill-based, and makes it less spammy, I understand. But 2 minutes seems pretty over the top.

Frost:

Killing Machine: Not really digging this talent anymore, at least not at my current gear level (which is probably the problem). My auto attack crit % is pretty low (13% chance without dark conviction?). This means that, assuming max hit rating, I have at best a 6.5% chance for this talent to proc. When you factor in things such as resilience and other crit chance reducing abilities (Molten armor, demonic resilience, etc), I have somewhere around a 1-4% chance for this talent to proc, which is pretty awful.

Yes, this talent becomes more attractive as my crit chance increases. If I can assume to have 34% crit chance in end-game gear, that gives me a 17% proc rate off of auto attacks (again, assuming max hit rating). Better, but it's still only a 17% proc rate to do double damage on one of my main frost attacks. What's the problem with that you ask? Well..

Subversion + rime = 24% extra crit chance on obliterate, before gear. Factor in just my base crit chance of 13% right now, and it becomes 37%. Add annihilation and it's 40%. So the fact that obliterate has an innately high crit chance via good supporting talent picks makes killing machine less desirable.

Rime = Icy touch will have a very crit chance as well (can't see my char sheet for spell crit right now, so I can't give the math).

Howling blast = Damage is disappointing, so unless I'm AOEing something, I'd rather blow a killing machine proc on something else anyways, such as frost strike.

Frost strike = Damage is about equal to obliterate right now. This is where killing machine procs are best spent.

So, what does that mean? Killing machine, although available early in the tree, isn't really useful unless you're deep frost and want something to boost frost strike damage. Anyone who doesn't go deep in the tree, will skip killing machine, as their icy touch damage isn't amazing. People who go deep in the tree for howling blast, would probably rather use the proc on obliterate anyway, since it does more damage. People who go deep enough for frost strike will just only use it on frost strike when available.

For these reasons, it feels expensive for the 5 points, the placement feels wrong in the tree, and the fact that it only works off of auto attack crit chance makes it unattractive for pvpers.

Howling Blast: Damage is underwhelming. To be useful in AOE rotations, the actual cost essentially requires a blood rune, making this technically a 3 rune cost ability to be used for the damage it's balanced around. The damage is underwhelming if the extra targets do not have frost fever. This ability also feels a bit awkward to use in rotations as well, because of the pestilence requirement to make the most out of this. It really just feels like a 3 rune ability. You only use it when AoEing, because the single target damage is always less than that of obliterate, especially if frost fever isn't up on the target. If you use it without spreading frost fever first, the damage is just bad (500 damage at 80 with 2400 AP).

Also, it's worth noting that this talent can probably be skipped for pvp, as it has a huge diseases dependency, and you're better off using obliterate instead every time. If you want to blast a single target, obliterate is better, diseases up or not. You're not going to AOE a group of players down when it's doing 2250 damage on a crit when frost fever is up.

I almost wish this ability was swapped with hungering cold, did significantly more damage with a higher cooldown (back to 10 seconds), and had it's disease dependency tweaked.

The old howling blast we had felt more like a 51 point talent than hungering ever has.

Rime: Doesn't feel like a good talent because howling blast feels pretty weak, for reasons already stated.

Hungering Cold: I still personally think that hungering cold would have been better served as a 1F1U talent. An emergency CC should be used with a more readily available resource. The problem, then, is it interferes with the so many other 1F1U abilities we have as frost.

This talent is OK. I've used it in a few arena matches, mostly to end up forcing a trinket. It's useful, but certainly doesn't "wow" me. You also only get one shot with it per minute.

Blood of the North: Doesn't need to be a 5 point talent again, does it? Feels too expensive.

Chains of Ice: Now that this is dispelable, can we please just have it apply frost fever at the core level now? The fact that it doesn't already screws with pvp rotations right off the bat. Players don't need to dispel anything to screw with our "standard" rotations. The fact that Chains doesn't do this by default mimicks this problem already, as it puts this 3rd frost rune requirement in. We can't chains, and apply frost fever, and do a 1F1U ability in the same rotation. We have to pick one, and not using chains is often not an option. Please consider fixing this, and reworking endless winter.

I'll get to unholy later.

DK Changes from today's patch thus far:

2008-09-24T13:39:00.005-06:00

I haven't been able to compile a complete list, as I'm still at work. However, here is a sneak peak at what's changed for us this patch (not a complete list):

Damage Buffs:

frost strike buffed back to 60%
obliterate bonus damage increased by around 35%
death coil damage tripled
plague strike bonus damage tripled
icy touch damage doubled
blood strike bonus damage tripled

Survivability Nerfs:

Anti-Magic Shell has a 1 minute cooldown
Strangulate has a 2 minute cooldown

Survivability Buffs:

AMZ buffed to 14k

So, who saw these coming? =]

I'll update this later as I get time to test things out. Overall? Looks great. Our damage sucked, and our survivability was over the top. This is a nice shift of focus.

Thoughts on the chains of ice changes:

2008-09-24T01:01:00.003-06:00

Everyone is up in arms about this. What most people don't realize, however, is how much better chains is than it used to be, even with it being dispelable now.

It used to have a 20 second cooldown, and cost 2 frost runes. Now it has half the cost, with no cooldown. It's fine, but I want to bring up a few points.

First let me state, as I did in this thread here, that it's current iteration is really, really overpowered.

Here's why it will be fine:

The mere fact that we can apply snares (that are almost a root), instantly, that will often stick even if dispelable is more than enough to make it workable.
Where are all the people that were just saying we shouldn't be balanced around 1vs1?
Chains of ice, in it's current iteration, is hands down the single best snare in the game, BY FAR. Nothing else even comes remotely close to it's effectiveness.
It's like imp hamstring 100% of the time, and can be applied from 20-30 yards away.
If you're grouping with other people, they can help cover the fact that it's dispelable with debuffs of their own, or putting DPS pressure on the snared target.
Like I said earlier in another thread, you have to make a choice: Dispel, or heal. You can't always do both, especially if the DPS pressure is being poured on hard.

And, as I list here, it's actually going to be more balanced than you think.

Here's why:

Shiv: (with crip poison)
1) Dispelable with a 30% dispel resist rate via vile poisons
2) Quick and cheap to apply
3) Melee range
4) Builds a combo point to be used for burst or utility

Chains of ice:
1) Dispelable, with a 30% resist rate via virulence
2) Quick to apply, though slightly more costly, relatively speaking
3) can be applied from 20-30 yards away, and is a better initial snare than any other for the first part of the duration
4) builds runic power to be used for burst or utility

So the difference? One incurs slightly more of a DPS penalty (chains, due to rotations and FU burst), but can be applied from a much further range.

The damage loss, however, can be made up for in other areas. This is an extreme example, but imagine if death coil suddenly did 10x more damage. You'd really start caring about building up RP quickly, and wouldn't care which runes were expelled to do so, would you not? Chew on that for a while. There's more than one way to skin a rogue.

So as I said, there brings up the point: What about our damage? Do we have to rely on others to force GCD options between dispelling and healing? Right now, I would say absolutely. Should it be this way? Not if Blizzard wants us to be viable melee classes on our own without relying on burst or damage from others to put enough pressure on healers to ignore our debuffs (including chains). That's up to them, but I personally feel as if our burst is lacking.

If you want a more in depth example, please referrence this post.

I'll paste it here:

Q u o t e:

I never said chains of ice isn't powerful. But with ALL nefs combined, we will be laughable. It might be the strongest root in the game, fine, nerf it so it doesn't have the initial 0% movement speed. Just don't make it dispellable. Its not like we can spam it. It's twice every 10 seconds, unless you have deathrunes. Then you're nefring your dmg.

90% of the time I agree with you Jayde, this time I think we got hit too hard PvP wise. I've said this before, LAST thing I want is to be the ret pally of BC, which had to wait 1.5 years to get any sort of buff because Blizz finally figured out they suck in every single arena bracket.

To be honest, I don't think we put out enough damage to warrant a tough choice between healing through it and dispelling things off. That's the bigger problem.

Look at it from the other side of the coin. If you have a rogue beating on you as a druid, you have several choices, depending on how much damage you're taking and how quickly.

You can:

A) Try to CC the rogue off first.
B) put up abolish poison first
C) Bark skin first
D) Start spamming lifeblooms + rejuv first
E) NS + HT yourself up quickly.

Depending on how much damage you take, you might start with option a and b first, to mitigate future damage if the stream of damage you're taking isn't too bad. This lets you be more efficient with mana spent on healing.

The more damage you are taking, the quicker the later choices start becoming more attractive. The slower and more steady the damage comes, the more attractive the earlier choices become, letting you be more efficient.

How does this directly apply to DKS? Well, it's simple. We don't put out the same scary damage to warrant needing to choose between dispelling yourself and healing yourself through emergency DK Burst damage, simply because we have zero ability to put that kind of burst pressure on people.

Global cooldowns are the most precious resource in any competitive PvP encounter, and how you choose to use them is what separates a good player from a bad one.

If the class you are using, however, has no way of forcing the victim of choosing between survival methods, then it becomes very easy to counter and is hardly considered a threat.

Warriors get around this by not only being able to stick to their target very well with hamstring, but also put artificial pressure on the target through mortal strike, which forces the target to take defensive action sooner rather than later. A skilled player who sees an opportunity of escape vs a warrior, will wait out the pressure (if possible) that the warrior is putting on them, get them CC'd, let MS fall off, and then make more efficient use of mana for heals.

My point is: Death knight's dont have the option of putting enough pressure on enemies like the example above, purely because the damage comes slowly and steady enough that the DK's damage can be ignored for the most part, and any side effects such as chains of ice and diseases can be dealt with in a timely and non-emergency fashion.

We don't force GCD panick the way many other classes can. The problem lies not from chains being dispelable, but not being able to simultaneously being able to put other sorts of pressure (such as damage) on the target as well.

The only thing we're good at right now is making people waste magic and dps cooldowns on us only if they go for us, since our mitigation and survivability mechanics are so great.

Unfortunately, that sort of 'reverse pressure' doesn't work in arenas, or you'd see nothing but a bunch of healer + prot warrior type teams dominating.

Just for kicks.

2008-09-24T00:35:00.001-06:00

A buddy of mine grabbed my video and did a bit of editing to make things more hilarious, paying some nice homage to the world of roguecraft series. :)

Pretty funny.

New Changes Coming Soon:

2008-09-23T21:23:00.004-06:00

Source for some of them.

The rest can be found looking over the new talent calculator, namely blood of the north and endless winter/chillblains.

Here they are, for the most part:

-- The ghoul is doing too much damage. He is receiving 100% of death knight strength, which is much higher than most pets.
-- Chains of Ice is going back to be being dispellable. It is probably the best snare in the game at the moment, for a class that already has Death Grip.
-- The same is true of both Strangulate and Mind Freeze. Strangulate's cooldown is going to go up. Mind Freeze remains the quick interrupt.
-- We're increasing the cooldown on Anti-Magic Shell. We don't think this will hurt DKs in PvE much, and it still leaves you with Icebound Fortitude to use often.

What GC forgot to mention was this:

Chillblains and endless winter have swapped places. Remember this thread? (maybe, maybe not. :)

Blood of the north has been updated (or will be soon) to make blood strike more attractive. Derived from here. (which is also why you see pestilence on botn as well, now)

In addition, I know we at least have this to look forward to as well.

Death Coil's coefficient was increased. We more recently changed the base points, say from 390 to 440 at rank 5. You probably don't have this last change yet. If you used a Death Coil every rotation, that's a lot of extra damage.

And, don't forget this, either!

We found that the real problem, IMO, was Death Coil and Frost Strike weren't hitting hard enough relative to other DK abilities, so they didn't feel like they were worth the button push, and subsequently, building up runic power didn't feel like a big deal. Both Death Coil and Frost Strike received serious buffs.

All in all, these are steps in the right direction.

DK 1vs1 Survivability vs Damage.

2008-09-22T17:44:00.006-06:00

So what's it like in a duel situation against a lot of classes?

Watch, and find out.

Spec used.

Track listing:
DT8 Project Feat Andrea Britton - Winter (Original Vocal Mix)
Emjay - So Clear (Stimulate) (Dogzilla Depth Charge remix)
Karen Overton - Forgot the name of the song. >_>

This is what happens when you can cherry pick so many over-budgeted talents like this. It's also easy to see how depressing the DK's damage is, especially once the ghoul goes down.

Watching this isn't necessarily a good way to visit class balance, but it is a good way to identify the issues that DKs are having in PvP.

And as far as not using unholy presence, I'm going to eat my words and say it's not worth it for this type of palystyle at all.

With unholy aura, and a real lack of ability to deal out burst damage at all, and not needing to worry about being caught in GCD, there's really no reason to use unholy presence given those factors in pvp, or anywhere, right now.

AMS, Death grip, mind freeze, ghoul stun via master of ghouls, and IBF are all off the GCD. The only other important ability that isn't is strangulate, which you can often cover by other interrupts. Unholy aura grants 15% movement speed. Being able to spam blood boil, death strike, plague strike, and icy touch 33% faster via the lower gcd, really doesn't yield any scary burst for anyone to worry about. The only ability that you'd want to burst in quickly is scourge strike, which is bugged, or obliterate, which is laughable burst without MoM or GoG.

Thus, unholy presence is actually not ideal in the long run in many situations for pvp, it seems, which is a pretty big let down. Most of our key abilities are off the gcd, making one of the big draws of unholy presence yielding you to be less likely to be caught in the gcd less valuable by a large margin.

I'll let everyone reach their own conclusions after watching it.

By the way: This spec vs holy paladin = never ending fight. We can't kill each other, and we can't die. Ever. I dueled one and finally just gave up after 30 minutes straight.

So I tried this spec in the arena. Here's what I get:

Another video

2008-09-21T07:35:00.005-06:00

Of this spec in action.

Link.

Track list:
Junkie XL feat. Saffron - Beauty Never Fades
Junkie XL - Mushroom
John B Mix (dont remember title)

And yet another, this time with a prot warrior for 2s fun.

Video #2
Coldplay - Talk Remix (Think it was gabriel and dresden?)

At this point, I'm going to go ahead and say something selfish: It sure does feel nice to play a class that shits all over rogues for once.

Someone asked me some pretty good questions after watching that second video. Here's my response if you're so inclined.

Q u o t e:
Just a few questions for you Jayde.

Do you plan on taking SS once it gets fixed? (Think its a bug, unless GC confirmed its intended)
And Wandering Plague when its fixed?

Maybe. We'll see how good they end up being.

Q u o t e:
I'm also assuming you're taking the death runes to get either more CoI's up or get 2 Death Strikes in a row.

Correct, among other things. It's really just to open up flexibility for what I can do. Multiple chains, blood boils, plague strikes to strip hots or charge night of the dead, death strikes, etc. It makes pvping with the current rune system feel more dynamic and less restrictive, which is hard to quantify over a straight DPS talent. At times, it doesn't do any good. At other times, it's completely invaluable having a stack of death runes to pull off abnormal combos.

Q u o t e:
Would you still take these talents if you were running DK/Healer?

Doubt it. I always shake up my builds depending on my role and who I'm playing with. This is optimal for double DPS, though.

DK survivability is way too good in pvp. I don't care what anyone says. It needs to be toned down without affecting our ability to tank in PvE, and our damage/burst needs to come up.

Q u o t e:
And wtf do you do if you face a lock that loves their fear button? No Lichborne means you rely on your trinket and AMS. Also skipping Icy Reach hurts too.

You'll see, soon enough. I'm in the middle of compiling a pretty good dueling video right now. Locks of ANY spec do not stand a chance. So what if I get feared? What are they going to do? Kill me? Heh. No my friend, they can't. It's literally impossible unless I simply go AFK. Besides, you have combos that you can setup such as mind freeze > strangulate > AMS. That's a very long time being unable to do jack. And by then, mind freeze is back, you still have ghoul stun, AMS is almost up again. Lichborne is simply overkill vs locks, and is completely unnecessary. You'll see what I mean.

As far as icy reach, I wouldn't get too comfortable with a 30 yard range on it. I'm not sure how long it's range is going to last. It needs to come down to at least 15 yards, if anything.

Q u o t e:
I find your build interesting, I watched yoru vid, its kinda scary how well you can survive and how long you last. I can see why for 2dps teams, but healer/dps, I'd think getting few more talents in Frost and less talents in Blood would work. Dunno, just speculation. I just honestly think you've sacrificed too many talents just to get MoB. yes its nice, especially against rogues if you're running 2dps.

Mark of blood is underrated at the moment. It's actually effective given the cooldown now, and it's not dispelable (or at least rogues can't cloak it off). It's actually more handy to put it on targets that are beating on my partner, since I only need it in dire circumstances.

I feel like the new SL/SL lock without a counter. No single player can kill me as this spec in pvp. Nothing.

New PvP video (unholy)

2008-09-20T19:46:00.002-06:00

http://files.filefront.com/Jayde+Arenawmv/;11847596;/fileinfo.html

Using this build: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=j0eMacZZfMGhbbkrxqRfouu

Ok, so while you watch this, please keep a close eye on how much damage I'm doing, vs how much damage my ghoul is doing. It's pretty hard to tell the difference.

My first thoughts when I saw the latest patch notes was "yay! I'm going to have a strong pet as unholy now!" Then I realized that his damage probably came out of my own, to stay within budget. This is a problem.

There are really only a few main points I wanted to bring up by showing this:

1) First thing's first: The damage. My damage is pretty low. I'm blood striking for 450-500 damage, about 1k on crits. My plague strikes and icy touches are hitting for about 250 or so. My diseases are ticking for around 300 damage. Scourge strike is bugged, so I took it off my bar. Obliterate does around 1k-2.45k damage. Death coil hits for 500 damage. It feels like most of my damage ends up coming from my ghoul, or my gargoyle when I can pull it out.

Unholy blight is ticking for 48 or so damage, and makes my blood strikes hit a wee bit harder. I'm still underwhelmed with this ability. At least it has a nice graphic. :)

A smart team can/should kill off my ghoul immediately, and my damage is practically cut in half.

Overall my individual damage feels pathetic. Most of my yellow damage comes out to be what socio's dot's tick for. That's sad. Not only do we lack a comparative healing debuff (blood plague is a unique snowflake), but we also lack burst, big time. The burst we do have is also too reliant on diseases, which in turn, are too reliant in a lot of cases on RNG-Dispel factors and the almost-required virulence. To set up burst, I have to go through several GCDs to set up this optimal situation of diseases being up and then bursting. It's too much.

2) Survivability. It's over the top. Really.

AMS: AMS is like a CloS that has a 15s cooldown. I can't recall ever needing it every 15 seconds, so I could actually see this being pushed back to give casters a better chance. No it doesn't remove debuffs, but it's also off the gcd. I'm not sure a 5s duration is necessary if it's off the gcd. It also has a very cheap cost. The fact that it charges RP if it absorbs magical damage is just icing on the cake.

Icebound fortitude: I bet warriors cream over this ability daily. It's too good for pvp. 50% damage reduction and stun immunity with no detriment at all except a meager 20RP loss. The problem I have with this ability, is that unlike warriors who have to board up and switch to defensive stance, cutting off the capability to use many of their skills, as well as dropping their damage, I just press a button and keep going at full speed. No damage reduction, nothing. It's just an easy mode I-win button. My gut feeling is that it's too good in it's current state.

Using IBF probably needs to incur a 20% or so damage loss for the duration. This would have an effect on pve threat, so you'd probably have to bake in more bonus threat to frost presence for compensation.

Bone Shield: Icebound fortitude part deux. All of the above apply as well, except for the stun immunity. Not only that, but using it actually increases your damage as well? Ok.

Imp Rune tap: Amazing. I can see this being almost required for pvp specs, and is probably better left to deeper blood specs. It's healing me for 4200ish right now, every 30 seconds. Works wonders with my healthstone-conjuring friend, when combined with AMS, Bone shield, and IBF.

Shadow of Death: My gut instinct says that this is too good. You just spent forever killing me, and now you get to do it again. I get a kidney shot, my ghoul (if alive) gets to remain with me, and I feel like I get to start all over again. The sad thing is? My damage actually seems to go UP in ghoul form. What the hell?

3) Runic Power abilities.

Death coil: Still weak, and not worth casting unless you absolutely have a spare gcd and you're topped off anyways.

Unholy Blight: Hardly useful except to prevent rogues from vanishing, I suppose. Not worth the 60 RP in PvP at all. Very boring and underwhelming ability.

AMS: Obviously worth it, but probably too cheap.

IBF: Same.

Gargoyle: Feels like just another weak disease that drains RP (that isn't being used on deathcoil anyway) instead. Damage needs to come up substantially, especially for a 3 minute cooldown. It really just feels like a slightly stronger blood plague right now that uses a different mechanic to do it's damage.

RP offensive abilities feel way too weak. For something that takes so much effort to build up, I expect more of a result. Offensive RP abilities cost 2-3x more RP than defensive abilities, but are comparatively 2-3 times weaker. That doesn't add up.

IBF for 20 RP gives 12 seconds base of 50% damage reduction and stun immunity.
Deathcoil for 40 RP grants 500 offensive damage. What? *scratches head*

There needs to be a bigger choice between blowing RP on offensive vs defensive abilities. I'd actually prefer to see more 'burst' come out of our RP abilities, since it takes more effort to build up, requires you to be in melee range (which can't happen if you get kited), and can't be used as frequently in general compared to our strikes and diseases. It just makes sense to have things like death coil, DRW, frost strike, and gargoyle do big damage in that regard.

I also recommend increasing the cost on the defensive ones as well. Players should have to make a choice. Do big burst damage with my saved RP? Or use it to survive? This is not too dissimilar to warriors choosing to stay on their target while taking heavy damage and trying to burn all those big hits with all that rage, or dump it by going to defensive stance and boarding up.

3) Utility (chains and death grip)

Death grip is living up to it's expectations as a great peel ability to keep things off of socio. It's a rogue's worst nightmare. Then again, It's probably even worse for a warlock facing the possibility of being death gripped into a bunch of melee. I obviously like this ability a lot. I'd probably give it a 5 second immunity debuff to prevent people getting tossed around in BGs and world pvp, though by multiple DKs. We ALL know it's going to happen, and we ALL know the forums are going to be flooded about it. It is going to happen.

Chains of Ice: I honestly think it's a bit too good right now. The 20 yard range is what really makes it too good. Yes, using it cuts our damage back and screws some of our rotations a bit, but it's not nearly as bad as what it can do to the victim. It's a 20 yard range physical root/snare that doesn't have the DR of a root. Let's face it, 0% movement speed, even if only for a second or two, is a root. Being able to do it from range is over the top. If you manage to get away from a DK, and his death grip is on cooldown, AND he/she is running at 15% faster speed due to unholy presence, you shouldn't have to worry about getting rooted/snared from 20 or even 30 yards away again (with icy reach). Nerf the range. In a group environment, this snare is just stupidly good now. Cut this sucker back to at least an 8-10 yard range. Part of the victory of getting away from melee is that they can't snare you again. Chains of ice isn't playing nicely with that rule.

TLDR version: Damage without the ghoul is too low, ghoul damage is too high. Survivability is too high while keeping the same damage going. "Boarding up" on a DK doesn't incur any sort of damage penalty whatsoever. Not enough 'choice' between going blowing RP on offensive vs defensive abilities. Offensive abilities are far too weak for the cost, and defensive abilties are far too good for the cost.

Update: Good commentsso far. As I stated later in the thread, adding a damage reduction to IBF would only be a bad thing all around. I regret even thinking that statement, let alone stating it. :)

Hopefully with the damage pass, Death coil will once again be worth using. 550 or so damage at level 80 in this gear is just insulting. That's a tick of corruption, not an RP dump.

I also cleaned up my build and went with something more offensive, while still keeping all of my super over-budgeted survivability talents: This.

Which presence is best for pvp?

2008-09-17T15:09:00.005-06:00

In case some of you are still wondering, I've already been through this argument here. :)

Q u o t e:
If we stick to the target we can BS/BB and RP dump and repeat.

This is key. I underlined the most important word in that sentence.

Q u o t e:
Blood presence = more damage

This is only true if you can stick to the target for the vast majority of the fight.

Q u o t e:
Blood presence = bigger burst

Actually, unholy presence is. You even already outlined how and why:

Q u o t e:
Unholy presence - 1 GCD
IT or Chains - 1 second
Plague Strike - 2 seconds
SS/Obliterate - 3 seconds

Blood presence - 1.5 GCD
IT or Chains - 1.5
Plague Strike - 3.0
SS/Obliterate - 4.5

Your auto attack damage is the same, since 15% more auto attack damage = 15% faster auto attack speed. Your specials are doing 15% more damage in blood presence, yes. However, you are spending your runes and doing specials 33% faster (which yields a bigger burst potential).

Let's use your own example, using some static numbers. And let's also assume that you don't even need to use chains, and you're not getting kited, which plays in favor of blood presence.

Blood presence:

IT = 575 damage (500 *1.15)
Plague strike = 575 damage (500 *1.15)
Obliterate = 1150 damage (1000 * 1.15) = 2300 damage in 4.5s This is a burst DPS of 511.

versus

Unholy presence:

IT = 500 damage
Plague strike = 500 damage
Obliterate = 1000 damage = 2000 damage in 3s. This is a burst DPS of 666.

Again, auto attack damage per second (not damage per hit) is the same, so it's a nil factor.
Once you factor in that as a melee class, you will spend a considerable amount of time chasing the target, the fact that unholy presence also offers a tool to aide in this by providing a 15% run speed tips it more in the favor of being the pvp presence.

Unholy presence is better burst damage in pvp, and better mobility. Not to mention, there also is the intangible bonus of being much less likely caught in GCD when you need to hit IBF, bone armor, or strangulate. It has defensive purposes as well, in this light, that blood presence cannot provide, due to the GCD barrier.

Edit: Fixed Math Errors.

Wow, where do I begin?

2008-09-17T01:52:00.011-06:00

So while I was at work today, I came across this thread. I felt very compelled to get my piece in on this, since Unholy Blight has always bothered me as a 51 point talent, for several reasons.

Here's the short story (which just about everyone agreed with I think), and if you're so inclined, the long story as well. Keep in mind, I also bring up the argument that not only do we have to spend several GCDs to gain AOE threat, and have to deal with the target cap of pestilence, but we're the only tanking class without access to an AOE taunt. This means that it's DOUBLY important to let every single spec have access to essential and effective AOE tanking tools, tools that unholy blight was holding the monopoly on in the AOE threat department.

If you take some time to look over the thread and my arguments, I think you'll agree. Apparently, the devs agree as well.

In fact, it looks like they'll be implementing several of my suggestions for future changes very shortly. Here is the main list of things coming.

Things that I've been harping for especiallly lately, with factual and informed posts to back them up include:

-- Death Coil, Frost Strike, Death and Decay damage increased. (Look at any of my recent damage tests and feedback posts, including the UB thread, as well as posts on this blog)

-- Bloody Strikes and Scent of Blood swapped places. (feedback source) (This is so that other trees like frost can access it for better RP generation via tanking, for more Frost strikes)

-- Double rune abilities damage increased: Obliterate, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike, Death Strike. (feedback source)

-- Unholy Blight no longer causes Blood Plague, but had its cooldown removed. (feedback source)

-- Pestilence has no target limit. (It still has a radius limit.) Pesilence glyph now increases area. (feedback source)

-- Frost Presence now grants 10% total health in addition to its current bonuses. (feedback source)

Among others that I'm sure we'll see implemented soon. :) The rest of the changes that are coming are just gravy.

I love Blizzard. They actually listen if you have a good argument.

Current List of DK Concerns:

2008-09-16T09:14:00.001-06:00

As I listed in this post:

With the expansion just under a couple of months away, I wanted go ahead and put together a list of concerns that I, and others, have with this class at this point in time:

1) Runeforging. We already have a blue thread on this, but hopefully this perk to the class will end up being more fun and exciting than just another set of enchants. This particular mechanic had so much potential, but this is the one area that I firmly believe didn't receive enough planning from the get-go. I really liked Hadassa's post about runeforging (found here:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8202576984&postId=82017104353&sid=2000#0). I really wish Blizzard would be able to find the way to implement something like this in the future, if right now it's simply not possible.

2) The Ongoing debate between 2H vs DW. Personal bias aside, it would be wonderful if these two could coexist peacefully and always be equally viable at every step of gear generation. Unfortunately, given the history of gear progression with classes that have the option to dual wield, I see this being a very difficult thing to balance with regards to making both equally viable at all times. While it's normal for some specs' relative power to fluxuate as gear and encounters progress and change, usually one spec or playstyle ultimately wins out in the end. That, I believe, is the main concern on everyone's mind: In the end, which style is going to produce the higher DPS? Few are really concerned with how things are performing right now, but more concerned with how things will be performing in the future when the class's mechanics are in a much more fixed state, in relation to class balance in all aspects of PvE and PvP (where it's much more difficult to change class fundamentals if things don't work out to be balanced for 2h vs dw in the end).

3) Tanking viability. This one is pretty huge, and probably will get overall more visibility than any other issue (and rightfully so). There is a fairly large concern that I see popping up over this forum, as well as others that I follow, that DK tanks are not quite up to par with the others as of yet. As of right now, the threat seems fairly low, which essentially has everything to do with our DPS reductions, as we rely on far fewer innate bonus threat modifying abilities to generate and hold agro (with the exception of D&D). But I have to ask: As far as D&D is concerned, should it really be that way? Are imaginary inflated numbers more fun to use than actually doing more damage? Of course not. Ideally, all tanks would be more fun to play if they did generated more threat via doing more damage, rather than spamming buttons that apply debuffs that generate invisible +threat numbers to build hate that you can only see via 3rd party addons (Example: Sunder Armor vs Devastate). Doing damage is always more fun. That seems to be one of the main philosophy shifts that this expansion brings to tanking, and one that I welcome with open arms.

However, getting back to the main point, DKs seem to have lower armor than most other tanks, as well as a smaller health pool, in addition to relying heavily on avoidance without having fall-back talents such as ones that grant crit immunity early on (such as the talents druids can spec into, for example). This means that the damage we take between cooldowns and avoidance RNG procs is actually pretty high, and hurts undergeared DKs more than any of the other tanks. However, while think DKs might have some issues of tanking viability early on, I think that they might actually end up scaling with gear well enough in the later stages of content to at least be equal with the other tanks. This is mostly in part to things such as ridiculous amounts of STR on tanking gear now (thank you!), coupled with core abilities such as forceful deflection (another suggestion implemented via feedback here). Also, when our damage is balanced (raised a bit in relation to others right now, or have everyone else's lowered), our threat will be too. I'm not too concerned with threat right now, as our threat ties directly into the damage we do.

4) PvE DPS viability. I won't say a lot on this topic, as the numbers (and to a lesser degree, the talents) are still in a state of flux right now. I'm not sure where the final numbers will land, along with our place on the DPS meters, but hopefully they won't be too much lower than the pure DPS classes. Do I expect to do as much or more DPS than a destro warlock, hunter, or rogue on single fights? Or as much damage as a mage on AOE fights? Of course not. Right now I'm hoping that I can pick the playstyle of DK that I like and be at least as competitive as a DPS warrior or enhancement shaman, however. Blood DK's seem to have excellent single target DPS potential, while Unholy DKs seem to bring a lot of AOE potential. In fact, Unholy DKs seem to be the premier support class for helping your magic-users AOE down trash that much faster due to ebon plague + unholy blight. However, I'm wondering then how useful those unholy (or frost, for that matter) DKs will be on single target (i.e. boss) encounters will be. Frost, on the other hand, is just doing too little damage right now. Both Howling blast and Frost Strike are doing roughly 33% of the damage they did a couple patches ago.

5) PvP viability. I already wrote up a pretty lengthy post about this here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9336502308&sid=2000, and my position hasn't really changed much on this issue at all. While the damage/dps numbers have changed since then, the actually mechanics really have not. Thus, my opinion still holds.

Edit: Blue response.

Sorry for the lack of updates..

2008-09-15T10:36:00.003-06:00

But there's really been nothing new to report on. I feel as if I've said just about everything I've wanted to up to this point. All I can do now is keep an eye on changes that are coming down the pipe, play with them when they come, and give further feedback.

Things are just rather slow right now, so I've spent some time over the past week playing the Warhammer online beta. It's pretty amazing how much more polished Blizzard products are, even in testing stages. Everytime I try a new MMO that hits the market, I'm always reminded just how good wow really is. The only thing I wish I could change about WoW that warhammer has, is letting people level up and gain exp/money from killing other players. The nicest thing about Warhammer is the fact that PvP yields a large amount of experience gained in their battlegrounds (called scenarios), keep battles, or just plain world pvp. It was a nice touch to actually level up off of killing another player. And while this is a nice feature, I'm not really convinced that Warhammer is going to have the staying power or the content to keep people interested in the long run. It feels very unpolished as of right now, and as a result, the gameplay feels often rushed.

In the mean time, I'll probably be mixing my time between playing warhammer between beta updates (when I can get some new things to test), until wrath is released. I'll probably just end up staying as alliance on Sargeras, which is my original home server. Tichondrius is great, but honestly it seems rather overrated. There are fantastic players there, don't get me wrong, but I kind of liked it better when each server had sort of their own cream of the crop. Now it seems that everyone and their mom moves to Tich, either because they are good, or because they know someone who is, or they want to try and improve. That's great, but what about those of us who just want to play the game to enjoy it? I really don't care for 10 minute BG queues, lengthy server login queues, or long waits on getting into the arena, either.

On that note, I'll probably be looking for a few more solid players to bolster the ranks of my guild on Sargeras in the near future. If you're interested and play there, or just interested in general, please send me an ingame mail to my druid "Mayah" on Sargeras alliance. The Tich thing just isn't working out for me very well, yet. It's been awfully hard to find a solid group of players who is looking forward to doing PvP as much as they are the new 10 man raids. Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places.

Edit: I've also re-enabled anonymous comments.

Jayde has been immortalized once again..

2008-09-11T19:17:00.004-06:00

Thanks to some friends over at DK Info, they've discovered that there is a new quest in Icecrown that calls upon none other than yours truly for help, as well as Munch and his newly risen ghoul, Melt. :) (Thanks, Hex!)

I had to run down for myself and check it out! =]

If you don't know what this is all about, you might want to look up The Deathknights of Acherus.

If anyone at Blizzard Entertainment is reading this, thank you. I am truly honored. :)

Best. Quest. Ever.

New Rune Strike sucks, As does the new Fel Armor:

2008-09-11T10:39:00.003-06:00

Here, and here.

Seems like a lot of people are unhappy with this patch. Hopefully the pendulum of balance will swing back the other way, as a lot of peoples' damage right now feels awfully low. It's the polar opposite of how things were at level 60 when Blizzard introduced the new level 70 talents. Hm, which I wonder: Perhaps why they are keeping it like this for now. The damage to survivability ratio on live right now is already at a pretty uneven balance. It's nothing like season 2 was at all. Perhaps they are afraid of repeating the same mistakes they made just before TBC was released, when hunters and rogues were running around killing people in 3 seconds flat.

Hopefully I'm right, because it's a little funny watching two people with 22k hp take 3 years to kill each other on the beta right now.

Edit: More rune strike feedback here.

Lake Wintergrasp, Warhammer beta.

2008-09-10T12:22:00.001-06:00

I know I haven't touched much on this, because I honestly haven't done it very much. I gave it my first real attempt (outside of sitting in the keep a couple weeks ago alt tabbed "farming" honor and arena points) a couple nights ago, and the first impression was not a good one. It has potential, but if I had to sum it up in one word right now it would be "confusion".

I mean, I know what the end goal is, because i sat in the keep: Use siege vehicles to knock down the keep door inside. But I guess it just gets confusing for a new player to understand how you actually accomplish that. There doesn't really seem to be a set stream of clearly defined objectives and goals. When I went to the zone a couple nights ago, I ran up to what looked like a point of interest, which was a big building that looked somewhat important.

Ok, cool. Then I proceeded to get gangraped by about 50 alliance, and get stuck in a never ending cycle of being graveyard camped by 50 more people and siege weapons. Not so cool. I saw that you're going to change the GYs to be higher up in elevation, and then hopefully flying mounts will be completed disabled in that zone.

So after finally managing to run my corpse away from the zerg, and go back to my body and res, I hearthed out. That was pretty much the extent of my experience.

On another note, I've been playing the Warhammer online beta quite a bit since Sunday, and while the PvE content and much of the game is very unpolished, I must say that I absolutely love the fact that you can level up at a pretty decent rate completely via pvp and battlegrounds (called scenarios in their terms). You can pick up a bunch of repeatable quests, queue from anywhere you are via a button on the minimap, and fight the scenario for each little zone you quest in.

It's cool because in between queues you are doing quests in PvP zones, and you gain experience, money, and loot from killing players, as well as being rewarded for doing quests in those areas. Then, when the queue pops, you get to go play out a 10 minute battleground where you earn even more experience, money, and loot.

The public quest system in the game is pretty cool too. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the mechanics in that game, but it scores a ton of points in my book by putting heavy emphasis on not just letting, but rewarding players for heavy participation in world pvp and battlegrounds while they level. It doesn't interrupt the leveling process, because killing players nets you the same thing killing mobs would. You don't actually loot the players' items, but you at least are rewarded in several ways for pvping.

As an example: I logged out monday night after almost reaching level 12. I log in last night, start running to the next, higher level area, and on the way, I get jumped by someone my level. I turn around and slit his throat (I'm playing a witch elf), and it was a decent enough chunk of exp to level me up. I gained a level, by killing another player. How freaking cool is that??

The PvE content obviously will never touch WoWs, but their PvP system does honestly deserve a glance. It would totally kick ass if wow had a system like that, because I enjoy wow's combat better than I do Warhammers.

Have chains of ice apply frost fever?

2008-09-09T09:37:00.001-06:00

Discussion here:

1) Even with the damage out of whack as frost right now, I honestly prefer pvp as frost simply due to endless winter. Having chains of ice apply frost fever helps tremendously with pvp rotations as a whole. As either blood or unholy, I have to basically go through a whole extra rotation before I can even think about using a 1F1U rune ability. This also makes death strike annoying to use as any spec other than frost (even where it's less effective), simply because I have to do chains > plague > icy touch > blood runes > wait for 3rd frost rune to come back > death strike. It just doesn't flow very smoothly. This is, of course, assuming that all of my diseases stick on the target. This is also another reason why I wish death strike simply gave 100% healing done, and 50% extra per diseases. (rather than none + 100% per disease). Death strike is another of those abilities that I think would do well to have less disease dependencies.

2) This leads me to this point, because of that situation, having to use 3 frost runes per rotation in pvp really messes up my rotations in pvp as essentially any spec wanting to "finish" with a 1F1U strike. This is because chains of ice doesn't apply frost fever at the core level. If this one change was made, I'd be a lot more comfortable pvping on the dk, and it would feel infinitely "smoother" to play.

3) If Icy touch damage is going to stay low as it is, I see no reason to not have chains of ice be our "go to" frost fever application spell for rotations. This one change alone could be made without breaking the overall rotation philosophy. It would also lend itself well to tanks that need to snare a mob (forfeiting icy touch that rotation), without forcing them to screw up their rotations.

4) The chillblains > endless winter talent feels bloated as is already anyway. I feel like I have to basically spend 5 extra talent points in the frost tree if I'm going frost spec if I want to pvp without it being a headache. That's not fun, because I feel cheated out of cool other talents because I feel compelled to pick up something that mechanically feels mandatory. I think you could do well to make chillblains 2/2 for 15/30%, and roll endless winter in with it to make mind freeze cost 10/20 RP less. That would feel much better speccing into.

Just some thoughts. :)

Latest blood/unholy test.

2008-09-07T13:23:00.003-06:00

After discovering that the boss target dummy in orgrimmar has no armor (some boss he is!), I decided to head to dalaran after the servers became stable again and do another test, using a supposedly higher dps build of http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=2305320530000305201150213510000000000000000000000000000230200305003100000000000000000

The results of this higher DPS build on a target dummy with armor?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMQn_c8JvRI/AAAAAAAAALM/rUO8jganXro/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_141148.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMQn8tZWwuI/AAAAAAAAALE/4vlWpm1ktJs/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_141150.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMQn6Ef-gOI/AAAAAAAAAK8/sD8gbyVcRkY/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_141153.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMQn3SpxgBI/AAAAAAAAAK0/JGYrigElPFU/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_141158.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMQny_w9czI/AAAAAAAAAKs/-eMbXuP17hQ/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_141210.jpg

As you can see, this is substantially lower (and rightfully so, since this target has armor).

Notice the overall make up of damage. It's mostly necrosis + white damage. What does this tell you? Kiss 2hand viability good bye, unless things change considerably for the better with regards to 2h scaling.

Overall, I'm simply underwhelmed with the damage I am putting out right now.

In case you were wondering what all those screen shots were for

2008-09-07T01:25:00.003-06:00

They were for this. :)

Here is the feedback, as follows:

Wahhh I can't kill players in 2 shots anymore! :P

In all seriousness, here are some screenshots of my dps vs raid boss target dummy.

A few things to keep in mind:

1) I'm in mostly PvP gear.
2) My hit rating is absolutely horrible.
3) I'm not 100% PVE dps spec, but close.
4) Obliterate in DRM and MoM is great, and just what the doctor ordered.
5) Rune Strike damage adds up be higher than even oblit. This would be a nice knob to turn for tweaking damage. And personally, I think it's fun to use. And no, I don't macro it.
6) You can't see it in the screen shots, but I had blood worms specced, and they added up to be about only 75DPS with 3/3.

NOTE: Recount, the DPS mod I'm using to record all of these tests is slightly bugged on the beta right now. Where it has "glancing" listed, it's actually "crit" data. Please keep this in mind when you review these screen shots.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMMcx-76r8I/AAAAAAAAAIc/DYVxg7jMYro/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_190916.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMMcsL1EcLI/AAAAAAAAAIU/q-mOkQE7MBc/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_191030.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMMckqr-iHI/AAAAAAAAAIM/s-u_vegSphU/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_191050.jpg

Build used: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=jfmGqI00Vs0tkAo0ghzhZf

Edit: I'll add some more to this in a second.

I haven't done any instancing yet, so I can't say how good our threat is right now, so I can't/won't comment on D&D just yet.

Edit 2:

Retest with better PVE spec: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=2305320530000305201150113513020505030000000000000000000200000000000000000000000000000

DPS results:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNYtW2Z-aI/AAAAAAAAAJU/RJhAYOPqxlo/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_231828.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNYp-hRKSI/AAAAAAAAAJM/5vs9xb5Nw_Q/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_231833.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNYmqzwVXI/AAAAAAAAAJE/emG8Y5COalw/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_231839.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNYfoAGrVI/AAAAAAAAAI8/ZixP0kY8VEA/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_231842.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNYZE4wbiI/AAAAAAAAAI0/ey3zZEj_GM4/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090608_231844.jpg

Overall Preliminary Analysis:

I'm not liking this trend. Even while carrying a big, massive 2hander, my white dps is becoming to be a much bigger chunk of my overall DPS, which is only going to lead to DW being the dominant "option" (if you can really call it that) in the future.

Yes, this is partly because I take icy talons, but if you look at my other options, I don't really have a better choice.

Let me explain:

With the emphasis taken off our yellow damage so much, these early modifiers for yellow attacks are killing my yellow damage for blood spec.

This includes: Imp icy touch, black ice, glacier rot (which was a bad subspec talent before, but now is many times worse), and morbidity (only useful for tanking now).

I now have come to feel like I'm being punished by taking those talents, simply so I can get to good ones like annihilation and icy talons (which I actually don't like being forced into as blood, as it puts too much emphasis on white damage, which tips the scales in favor of Dual Wield).

I feel as if deathcoil and icy touch were over nerfed, a lot, and need to come back up in base damage.

I also feel like one of my old favorite talents, Sudden Doom, is now pretty terrible, simply because of the state of deathcoil's damage output right now.

Another thing I've noticed, is that most of my RP ends up getting used on rune strike. For 10 RP, I'm doing anywhere between 1900-5000 damage, and it's off the GCD. Death coil, on the other hand, is my only DPS RP Dump as blood outside of the lengthy cooldown DRW, and it does far, far less damage. Seriously. Even with sudden doom, it's putting out 2.9% of my over all damage. That's with 5/5 Black ice.

This means that I end up not even caring if I'm sitting at full RP and I have heart strikes to burn and shoot me over max RP, because spending a GCD isn't even worth it on death coil right now unless I absolutely have nothing else to spend that GCD on. That's not fun.

Please keep in mind that as much as I love my toon, I'm trying to keep this as objective as I possibly can. I'm just shooting straight with you about what I've noticed so far, and how it's making me feel.

Take it for what it's worth.

Edit3: Frost Damage

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNm4xPsVzI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/tPqbHvPPcws/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_002633.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNmuyDDqrI/AAAAAAAAAJs/nTu5_UWOGM0/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_002701.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNmrzTHaaI/AAAAAAAAAJk/ZNVhFlxc5x0/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_002716.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4-PpmLiFNSo/SMNoHh9122I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/TmyzWOv-bwY/s1600-h/WoWScrnShot_090708_003506.jpg
As you can see, howling blast is broken right now, and definitely not doing it's intended damage.

I used a very unrealistic spec to try and squeeze out as much possible damage as I could, and frost still falls embarrassingly short of being a good DPS option right now.

Here's what I used: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=2305000500000000000000000003202505033502110201203101350230100000000000000000000000000

So yeah, as you can see, that's a very unrealistic spec. (No hungering cold, lichborne, merciless combat since it doesn't apply to these tests, etc)

As far as a rune enchant, I used Razorice, if that matters.

There's not really a whole lot to say about frost right now, other than it's really underwhelming. A lot of it has to do with how poor of a performer icy touch is right now. Even with maxed out talents supporting it, it's doing maybe 600 damage right now. That's downright awful. Then, you have to factor in that howling blast is broken.

However, it would take those two skills to be bumped up significantly to make up for the damage loss. I'm really starting to wonder if howling blast even needs a cooldown right now. It just feels clunky with this arbitrary 6 second cooldown.

Another thing I've noticed, is that since I'm less inclined to use icy touch as much anymore, my RP generation has taken a nose dive since last patch. I often find myself with JUST enough RP to get by, which might be OK for DPS in PVE, but as soon as you run into situations where you have to weave in AMS, IBF, and Hungering Cold, you'll have some big problems with RP generation.

As a matter of fact, my RP feels so starved as frost, that I feel as if it's my limiting factor for DPS right now. I'm constantly empty. Compare this to blood, where I'm frequently topped off in RP, although I think that has more to do with the fact that blood simply doesn't have any good RP dumps outside of rune strike and DRW. That's because death coil isn't worth the GCD.

There are a lot of factors that play into this.

1) Howling blast is my main damage dealer that's in chill of the grave, yet it's on a cooldown.
2) The addition of Rune Strike adds to my RP strain.
3) Same with Horn of winter, albeit less frequently.
4) Icy touch isn't worth the GCD except to apply frost fever, thus it being in chill of the grave isn't that big of a deal.
5) Frost strike eats up anything that's left.
6) Hungering cold still feels too expensive, given it's 60 RP cost, due to all of the above.
Conclusions thus far:

Things I like:

I'm actually liking the fact that my blood strikes and other such abilities that have disease requirements don't rely as much on diseases up to do the same damage. It's nice if diseases fall off, or get cleansed, or a debuff limit gets reached, or whatever. I like this change a lot.

However, the one ability that I think was overlooked in this department was Death Strike. I'd like to see death strike heal for 100% of the damage done without any diseases, and add 50% more per disease, to follow this same trend.

Other Suggestions:

Howling blast's cooldown needs to go.
Icy Touch needs it's base damage raised by 50% at least.
Deathcoil needs it's base damage raised significantly as well.
Obliterate needs to be added into chill of the grave, making it grant 20 RP per use.

Will add more later after more tests.

Misc screen shots.

2008-09-06T18:11:00.009-06:00

My biggest problem I have with Death Knights:

2008-09-05T12:06:00.002-06:00

The fact that after I get done going through all that super cool new DK content, I have to go trudge off to outland, almost arbitrarily, all by myself.

If the main fight has shifted to northrend, why am I going to outland, other than to "just level"? There seems to be this huge disconnect of purpose there. I just broke free of the Lich King's will, so my first order of business is to... go to outland? Wait, what? At first I was too excited to start playing and testing the class, I didn't even notice or care. But from a design standpoint, it just doesn't make sense, and it just doesn't feel right.

I know it's too late, but If I had to make any recommendations right now, it would be that you start at 68 or 70 instead of 55. Is this some sort of way to just keep outland somewhat alive and not totally forgotten?

I'm not really sure I'm going to be super psyched about this aspect of the expansion when it does go live, simply because as all my friends and guildies are going to be off going to fight the fight in northrend, here I go trudging my way through outland by myself, for no apparent reason other than to gain levels, so I can get to the rest of the new content.

Leveling up new races I can understand. But this particular aspect of playing the death knight certainly does not feel very "heroic". It feels very out of place and disconnected from the theme and focus of wrath of the lich king.

I'm certainly not the only one that feels this way, am I?

Right now I feel like there just has to be some sort of super compelling quest/reason/purpose that would explain why we were started at a level that would make us have a desire to go to outland, other than to simply gain levels.

Edit: There is one thing I overlooked, though.

Remember, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of newbie death knights running around for the first few days/weeks/months.

If they could jump into northrend immediately, would you really want all these characters who might have been made with the intention of never even reaching level 71 competing with you for your quest mobs in the new northrend zones?

Eh, anyways, that being the case... I feel like there should probably be a pretty big final quest to send you to your faction or racial leader where you pledge your allegiance to them, get a big super fat XP bonus (since you still currently fall about 15% short of dinging 58 going through the starter quest line). Then, have them tell you to grow more powerful while bolstering the now abandoned forces in outland where you will hone your skills against Arthas's minions.

Something. There just needs to be something to fill that disconnect. A new player that may have had a 55, but never anything beyond still might not know to head to outland. I don't really seem to recall a quest line leading you from the major cities to blasted lands to clue people in, since it was the major focal point of the last expansion anyway. There didn't need to be one.

Warlock beefs so far this expansion:

2008-09-04T12:48:00.001-06:00

The problem with destruction is that it still relies too heavily on actual cast time spells to start combo's off.

I don't understand where there aren't some "night fall" type talents in destruction, such as giving immolation ticks a chance to proc insta cast incinerates or soul fires. (Think of the synergy with shadowflame here)

Why is the succubus still so fragile? You'd think that a demon who's able to disappear would be a bit more nimble and harder for melee to hit. Why not give her a passively high evasion rate?
Why does she die in basically 3 hits?
Why does seduce share DR with fear still?
Why does seduce, which is a channeled spell, have a cast time on top of that?

Why am I not impressed with shadowflame yet? It the secondary burn effect of putting immo on all those targets at nice, but I'm seeing further potential in this spell here.

Why is there not an improved conflag that can ignite all immolated targets at the same time withing X distance of the target? Wouldn't that make shadowflame (a destruction spell) more attractive, and more fun, to use? Especially with the pyroclasm change.

I look at hunters and get excited to use explosive shot. 15% increased crit chance and chance to stun on top of that? Instant cast? 6s cooldown? Doesn't require a dispelable debuff to be on any of the targets first? Can launch it from 41 yards away? Knowing this, does an improved conflag ability really seem that over the top?

Why is soul fire still boring to use? It's a copy/paste version of pyroblast, without a lot of cool talents to support it really, plus it costs a shard! Why can't chaos bolt just be a massive (and shardless) upgrade to soulfire?

Snares are the bane of warlocks, and always have been. Getting snared on my warlock is far, far more annoying than any other class I've ever played. We have no intercept, intervene, snare reduction talents, heavy armor, blink, teleports, or shape shifting abilities. We simply have to eat it, every time. In fact, the class is designed around eating melee damage constantly. Plus, we don't even have a good counter snare. Or at least we didn't, until we got the new Curse of Exhaustion.

Look at Fel armor (now demon armor). This armor was obviously designed with pvp applications in mind that we'd be taking hits constantly in pvp, which is why we get the pretty massive +healing received bonus. Why, then, do we not have snare-based defensive talents? Why not a talent that makes us take less damage while snared, or something that triggers when we get snared?

Why do we have so many improved demon talents early in the demo tree? Who actually takes improved succubus and improved voidwalker? Who cares about improved imp other than hardcore raiding guilds that want the smidgen of extra raid HP? Why can't we just have improved minions, sort of like demonic empowerment?

What's the deal with improved fear? Isn't it really only useful against rogues that CloS? Is that the main purpose? My problem with landing fears is being constantly interrupted/kicked/pummeled, or fear immune feral druids, BM hunters, death knights, and warriors. The resist problem went away with spell pen on pvp gear. This talent could be better, such as a cooldown making your next fear effect unresistable, uninteruptable (outside of stuns) and a horror effect on a cooldown.

Why does grim reach have to be so inaccessible to destruction, who arguably needs the longer range fears and curses even more?

Why is Malediction still so horrible?

Why is improved lifetap still not a tier 1 talent for affliction? It needs to be more accessible to destruction, which needs it far more than any of the trees.

Why did we get nether protection in destro instead of some sort of melee protection abilities instead, which is what it needs the most?

Why is improved immolate still a horrible waste of points, and is only taken to pick up conflag?

Why can't you just roll imp soul leech into soul leech? That talent has always been lacking since the beginning of TBC simply because the healing portion often gets over healed.

Why is shadow and flame (a mostly pve talent) still a prereq to shadowfury (a mostly pvp talent)?

Why does shadow fury cost a ridiculous amount of mana when A) It's mostly a pvp talent, and B) It's really only typically used on a low number of targets (usually just 1 half the time) as a spell interrupt, or to chain a fear after it?

And finally: Why does haste still not decrease the amount of time dots need to run their full effect?

I must say that after reviewing a lot of the changes for warlocks this expansion, I haven't really been impressed. Socio knows how underwhelmed I've been with the lock changes.

Full northrend music collection (almost 1GB)

2008-09-04T09:01:00.001-06:00

For those of you who dig this sort of thing, here you go. The ebon hold stuff is amazing. =]

Deep Blood PvP spec issues with subspec choices:

2008-09-03T19:20:00.002-06:00

Blood PvP spec:

Couple things to note:
Early unholy talents compliment deep blood very well for pvp, at least for the first two tiers.

Unholy Tier 1 with this spec.
A) Vicious strikes is a great dual purpose talent for pve/pvp in just about any scenario.
B) Morbidity follows suit. Great dual purpose tanking/pvp talent as blood spec with sudden doom plays well with any talents that improve deathcoil. This is double true if you pick up lichborne.
C) Anticipation is really 100% for PVE tanking.

Overall, Tier 1 Unholy is fantastic for deep blood pvp.

Unholy Tier 2 with the same spec.
A) Epidemic is ok, but hardly required. With many various ways to remove diseases (some effortlessly via abolish disease and disease cleansing totems), banking on each application of disease lasting the full 18 seconds isn't a good strategy. Mostly a PVE talent.
B) Virulence grants dispel resistance, which is fantastic for pvp. Given that our diseases are less spammable in our assumed rotations than rogue poisons, and far, far less spammable than warlock dots, it's going to make virulence either nearly required against some classes (paladin, with no brainless way to remove diseases other than 1 disease per cleanse), or almost seem like a waste of points (shamans and priests). Given all the factors, I'd say that virulence at 30% dispel resistance is probably not going to be enough against the classes that we need it most against. I've played my hunter enough to know that going against well-played (this is key) shamans can seem like having improved stings is a waste of points, as poison cleansing totems seem to strip them off immediately anyways. The jury is still out on this talent for me right now.
C) Unholy Command seems like a talent that will be just as required for pvp as imp intercept is for warriors on live right now. I imagine this talent being just absolutely required for competitive pvp, but for right now(on the not-so-serious beta), you can get by with skipping a point or two in it.

Unholy Tier 3 with the same spec.
A) Outbreak only becomes a pvp-centric talent if you pick up scourge strike (similar to glacier rot in frost in tier 1, that it sucks without howling blast and frost strike), otherwise, primarily a tanking (AOE threat) talent.
B) Necrosis is OK, but nothing that I would really call required for pvp. It does help melt through heavy armor targets, though..
C) Corpse explosion. Fun in battlegrounds, but useless in arenas. A lot of fun to use while tanking! :)

Early frost talents are even better for deep blood pvp spec. Here's why.

Frost Tier 1 with the same spec.
A) Imp icy touch is useful, but not required. The 30% damage boost does stack nicely with the new bloody vengeance, but it's not nearly as useful as the new toughness.
B) Glacier rot I've already covered. Not really a good talent unless you're at least 31 points deep. This is a pretty weak Tier 1 talent overall, and should probably be just rolled into Rime.
C) Toughess is just fantastic for PvP. 50% reduction on snares, AND 15% more armor? Wow. This is the no brainer talent for pvpers, which sucks, because it means there's a lack of choice in this tier.

Frost Tier 2 with the same spec.
A) Icy reach is a no brainer. 30 yard range chains of ice is completely awesome.
B) Black Ice probably needs to be reworked as it's giving too much bonus to both frost strike and scourge strike. I'd probably change this to 2/4/6/8/10% increased crit chance with shadow and frost abilities. This makes it still appealing to both spells and frost/scourge strike, but gets rid of another unneeded multiplier which is currently making up some ridiculous damage. Good talent for pvp overall either way.
C) Nerves of cold steel I don't like, as I don't dig the dw thing at all for dks. It's fine for pvpers that choose to go that route I guess, though.

Frost Tier 3 with the same spec.
A) Icy talons is only really good if you're going deep into frost for either more synergy via killing machine, or you need to buff a raid via the group haste talent. It's not really a great choice for pvp as a last pick filler.
B) Lichborne is obviously good.
C) Annihilation I don't care for as a design philosophy, simply because I don't think obliterate does enough damage to warrant disease removal to begin with. I only picked it up for 3% crit for frost strike for a while, but then later just dropped it once I found out how good killing machine becomes later with haste talents, gear, and unholy presence.

Hunter vids from a buddy of mine:

2008-09-03T12:15:00.002-06:00

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9336797303&sid=2000

Pretty cool stuff. Mikizle is a hunter that I play with on Sargeras alliance, and he's taken the time to record some videos of what survival hunters can do right now in the beta.

I must say that the hunter changes have been nothing short of outstanding so far this expansion, and the class is shaping up to be a lot better than it has ever been before (and that includes pvp).

Check out some of his videos here.

Keep up the good work, Mikey!

Do death knights need better healing debuffs?

2008-09-03T09:11:00.003-06:00

I saw an interesting thread this morning over at http://deathknight.info/ about some people asking for better healing counter measures for pvp. Here is the post.

Here was my rebuttal.

"I think you guys are forgetting a big piece of the puzzle here.

Let's say we do bring a new and unique healing debuff to apply to targets that works alongside blood plague and mortal strike/aimed shot/wound poison.

You know what would happen then? Every team would have to consist of DK + warrior, or DK + Hunter, or DK + Rogue, and healers would basically stop pvping because it would be damn near impossible to keep someone alive that has MS on them, AND hots are getting removed, AND DKs would have an additional effect on them. It would just 100% completely flat out suck and not be fun for healers in pvp. At all.

Blizzard made this mistake once before in TBC alpha by letting wound poison stack with MS for 75% healing reduction. The only thing that changed was every arena team was then forced to bring a warrior and rogue to be competitive, and healers basically quit wanting to pvp (and rightfully so) because it was impossible to keep other people (or themselves) alive through that kind of crap.

You have to stop thinking in terms of 1vs1. The combination of blood plague + wound poison or an MS effect is already extremely strong. Druids are no longer going to be the gods of healing 3v3 teams by themselves anymore simply because of the addition of blood plague (which they can't remove).

I think the addition of DKs is going to shake things up nicely just fine the way it is. I'm really not certain we need an additional healing debuff as of this time, and if we do, it should be very minor that won't affect group balance severely.

The only reason I really pushed for blood plague to remove hots periodically is that hots, up until now, have never really had a counter-balancing factor. That, and having to plague strike every time you wanted to remove a diseases is hardly effective against a competent druid."

What do you guys think?

Death strike, Blood Strike, Obliterate:

2008-09-02T11:32:00.002-06:00

"I'm not digging obliterate at all anymore, for any spec.

It's just very much overshadowed by the other things every other tree offers as a replacement for that spot in the rotation.

And to be honest, I'd rather see obliterate become something other than a 'super blood strike that removes diseases' at this point.

DRM rotations as blood won't/don't use it because there aren't enough supporting talents in blood for it anymore, now that MoM doesn't affect it. Blood has an overabundance of blood runes via DRM, and this directly translates into wonderful synergy of sudden doom, bloody vengeance, abom's strength procs, along with better RP generation, as well as more attacks from DRW while it's up.

Frost will never use oblit if HB is ready to go, and even if I can't use HB, i'd rather use icy touch for 20 RP and similar damage for one rune. Not only does howling blast do more damage, but it only requires frost fever to do max damage, ignores armor, can AOE, and doesn't remove the disease. It's just a no-brainer.

Unholy has Scourge strike, which is also a no-brainer to use over oblit in every single way.

Without blood talents (read: DRM and MoM) supporting Obliterate, it's simply a bad skill that doesn't fit in anywhere, for any spec right now."

Now, with all that being said, I'd like to bring something up that I've brought up in the past:

I'd like to see death strike reworked a bit and make it cost 1 blood rune instead, and tweak it's effectiveness to go with it.

Reasons:
1) It feels clunky as a 1U1F cost. I like my finisher being HB or SS as frost/unholy as is. Death strike with a 1U1F cost as frost, which is very disease independent (outside of frost fever) always feels incredibly weak. The choice should really be between obliterate and the tree-specific finishers. Thus, obliterate needs to be reworked a bit to be a more universally powerful and useful ability that is independent on spec.

2) As Frost: Using blood strike as frost for blood of the north feels like a chore and isn't fun. There are many times I'd rather sneak death strikes into the rotation instead of blood strikes to catch up on healing a bit rather than do a bit of extra damage (again, if it cost 1B instead). I'd rather have the choice in the rotation be between blood strike and death strike. In a group scenario with a healer? Blood strike for more damage. Healer CC'd or solo and need a bit of extra healing? Death strike instead for that part of the rotation. Then, use a finisher. Ideally, blood of the north would cover blood strike, death strike, and pestilence.

3) As Unholy: Using blood boil and pestilence for reaping is fun and all, but again I'd rather see options for single target "combo" abilities to build up those death runes to make combat more fun and engaging. I'd like more choice in the build-up process for working towards those death runes/finisher moves. Again, it would be nice to see DS use a blood rune for unholy rotations just the same. You want to do AOE damage? Blood boil. Need a bit of extra healing? Death strike. Ideally, reaping would cover all of these abilities as well.

4) More choices = More fun. I think it's been made quite clear by several parties at this point that spending 33% of our runes on blood strikes half of the time (especially as frost) is not fun.

5) Death strike heal amount is very underwhelming unless it crits. This plays very well with deep blood specs that A) Have lots of blood runes, B) has a higher crit chance than other specs, and C) includes both vicious strikes and MoM. Blood would be a lot more fun if you had the choice of doing a lot of damage via heart strike in DRM rotations, or by using DS to heal yourself with those blood runes, which would further lend itself to blood being the self-healing tree. To go along with this point >

6) Obliterate would then need to be reworked into Death Rune Mastery, and have death strike removed.

7) Make Obliterate more friendly to use. 125% weapon damage and doesn't remove diseases? Generates 15 or even 20 RP per use? Obviously blood would want to use it with these changes over the other specs due to DRM, but why would the other specs want to? Shadow-resistant target? Don't SS, but oblit instead. Can't AOE? Use oblit instead, but make the damage worth it, and remove the disease-removing penalty.

8) Rework annihilation to have your blood strikes have a chance to refresh the diseases on the target, making the choice between death strike and blood strike tougher. Blood strike is simply boring right now, and this talent would really make things more fun and interesting. I'd also probably have it refresh the disease on the current target when pestilence is used as well. Right now you have a half-assed way of getting around this, by applying diseases on a target, then using pestilence, then tabbing to another target and using pestilence again (refreshing the diseases on the initial target). It just feels clunky to do it this way.
Edit: (I forgot to clarify this part) Then, I'd move annihilation to the blood tree, and give us a reason to sneak in 1 blood strike during the rotations with those overabundance of blood runes so that you don't have to use icy touch + PS again (which are just awful damage by themselves as blood spec). The idea here is to give you an abundance of blood runes via DRM working off oblit, and using one blood rune per rotation for a blood strike (or pestilence if AOEing) to refresh diseases. This essentially frees up the need for epidemic as blood, as well as lets you get off another oblit than you normally would, solidifying obliterate as our finisher move for blood.

9) Rework Death strike healing amount if it being a 1 rune cost is too much. 50% healing per disease? 75%? 1%? 1000%? The numbers are easy to play with, but I'd probably reduce it to 50-75% or so.

25 man vs 10 man raids: What's your pick?

2008-08-29T09:43:00.003-06:00

Coming from someone who doesn't like 25 man raids (I hated 40 with a passion), I am pretty excited to see that there's going to be less emphasis on which class you actually bring, and more on letting more classes be swappable, letting you bring your friends.

A buddy of mine (Cham, who played a mage) had a big problem with class stacking issues, and was always complaining about how useless he felt compared to my warlock. He had inferior damage, no summons or health stones, mana gems can't be passed out, and my lock had curse of shadows/elements. So what was he there for, then? Food? Heh. I couldn't help but agree with him, and it (among other things, like him watching me take on 3 people at once in a BG as SL/SL) eventually led him to getting burnt out on WoW via class envy. I can't really say I blame him, either. Playing a mage has never really tickled my fancy. I played a Wizard in EQ for far too long, and downtime is something that I absolutely loathe with a passion.

But getting back to the raiding issue: I also remember a lot of times we'd have to pass up someone who was more deserving of the raid slot that night (hunter), just so we could take a class that we really needed instead (shadow priest). Now, we won't have to make that choice. I like the fact that shadow priests no longer have the monopoly on raid mana regen.

I like where they are taking things, but again (and this is key), this is coming from someone who prefers 10 mans over 25 mans. And to be honest, I think that's where the eventual focus of raiding is inevitably going to fall when wow progresses past Wrath of the Lich King. I predict a big exodus of people from 25 man raids over to 10 mans, simply because it's simply a much bigger headache to lead and organize and satisfy 25 people than it is 10.

I really, honestly believe that 10 man raiding is going to completely overshadow 25 mans, as far as popularity goes. That's what's going to please most raiding customers, and I have a feeling that Blizzard is going to cater to them even more in the future after they see just how lopsided the preferrence really is.

So for me, I couldn't be happier. I can spend equal amounts of time doing PvP and PvE, without having to worry about running out of content after we finish 10 man Naxxramas, which will be our new entry-level Karazhan. No, I won't be able to pursue the uber 25 man trinkets to supplement my arena gear, nor will I be able to seek Frostmourne, as it will surely be a 25 man drop or quest line. However, I'll be able to comfortably enjoy both aspects of the game, without worrying about having to drop Player A, for a less deserving but ultimately more needed Player B.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm really excited for this expansion to hit. I have no doubt, from what I've seen this far, that Blizzard will nail it.

Blood Tap / Empower Rune Weapon:

2008-08-28T13:54:00.002-06:00

As far as blood tap goes, Is this being used the way it was originally intended? It seems rather pointless and redundant with all the new death rune talents in each tree now.

Might be more useful if it was made into an emergency RP boost instead, sort of like blood rage.

Also, I kind of feel that empower rune weapon doesn't really cut it for a 5 min cooldown. I often have to do a double take to make sure I've actually got the rune setup that I want before I pop it (i.e. I have 2Death 2Frost 2Unholy for 3x death strike or oblit spam), and the 25 RP it gives, while nice, doesn't really help me pop off a 51 pointer on demand, which is what would be really nice.

Perhaps Blood tap needs to boost RP at the cost of some health on the 1 m cooldown it has (like blood rage), and then have Empower Rune Weapon activate all runes (as death runes?), lower the cooldown a bit (3 mins?), and take off the RP generation.

It would be nice to have one ability for RP on demand needs, and another for rune burst on demand needs.

Right now Empower Rune Weapon serves both roles on one cooldown, but you typically only need one boost or the other. Not both. That, and it pays the price for this dual role with a hefty 5 min cooldown, which I'm not fond of.

On an unrelated topic, I had to disable anonymous comments on this site because a couple individuals ruined the fun for everyone.

Tanking Feedback from Strath run.

2008-08-27T06:00:00.005-06:00

Build used - http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=jbxZGgxzcgdMbRVsstcL (no annihilation because oblit isn't worth using as any spec, which is a big problem)

Video part 1: http://files.filefront.com/strath+01wmv/;11609495;/fileinfo.html
Video part 2: http://files.filefront.com/Strath2wmv/;11609912;/fileinfo.html

Note: A lot of the damage output in this video is skewed by the serpent sting bug from hunters. I often end up doing twice as much damage as I normally would, as does the rest of the group.

Synopsis of the instance run:

"This isn't a fast run or speed clear by any means (which I tend to enjoy more). This was all of our first attempts at this instance, and it was just a pug. I went with a warlock buddy from Tich, Socio, and we just joined up with 3 random dudes.

You can see the disparity between tanking spell casting bosses and hard hitting bosses. The first boss was actually the toughest, mostly because he randomly shoots these chains at someone and stuns them for the duration. This makes the first boss fight much too reliant on having a resto druid healer (basically someone that can keep heals going while CCed). The chains effect is physical, so grounding totems don't work. It is rather funny to watch, though, since after I died, the other DK ressed me as a ghoul. I then ended up killing the boss like that. =]

The second boss was a pushover, as I could mitigate a ton of his damage.

I'm not really sure what the third boss did, but it didn't seem too bad.

The last boss lays out a lot of AOE magic damage, and randomly mind blasts/sleeps a target other than the tank. Acclimation is a huge boon here. In fact, I'm more inclined at this point to prefer acclimation over Anti-Magic Zone. As I've stated before in an earlier alpha synopsis, acclimation requires no runes, no global cooldowns, and is constantly being refreshed on you and your raid. It's fantastic, and it stacks with frost aura."

First thing's first:

My mitigation when defensive cooldowns aren't up could be a bit better, as you can plainly see against the first boss. This might be skewed, however, due to a slightly over-tuned first boss in the instance (he hits noticeably harder than the other 3, and can completely stun your only healer for several seconds, leading to certain death without a resto druid.

One thing I've noticed, is that on single targets, my threat is really great. Then I began to wonder while tanking things... I realized that there were several situations I ran into where I gladly would have given up a frost strike or death coil or two, to have some sort of RP drain that boosts my defensive stats for a while, at least while my healer(s) get CC'd or silenced somehow. Even if it only lasted for 5-10 seconds or so, that would be great. Perhaps something that could be used to drain RP and boost parry chance greatly while it's active? I dunno. Maybe each tree could have something of it's own flavor.

Blade Barrier: This is kind of a big one for me. I really like this talent when it's up, but it seems like a pain to get going and even keep going sometimes. A lot of GCDs need to be spent on other things very often, and I normally don't want to blow through my runes as soon as possible. I often found that it's not even active very often, whereas my other first tier tanking talents are always going. While it's a fun and interesting concept, I've found that it's often too unreliable to have it going all the time, or even when you need to. If it falls off, I might have to completely jack with my rotations a bunch just to get blade barrier back up, which means I'm spending weird rune combos and wasting GCDS that might be needed for other things to get it (re)activated. In the end, I'd rather see this just become more friendly to use, as well as have the buff last longer, or just give me 10% parry chance flat out.

AOE threat for the most part was fantastic. It didn't help that I ran with another howling blast friendly pug DK, but it worked out very well other than that.

Another thing that's notable to mention: DK tanking, when I'm not getting torn in half by meathook, is FUN! Lots and lots and lots of fun. This is, by far, the most fun I've ever had on a tanking class. I can dish out of ton of damage, and can handle AOE pulls very well. That, to me, is perfect. Personally, I'm not a fan of really complicated pulls that take a lot of coordination to set up in 5man runs (MGT?). In raids, I can understand it (still don't prefer it, but I understand the reason for it). I'm the kind of person who likes to go in and pull as much as I can, really try to push the player skill of the group, and come out on top at the end. The DK really makes that possible with it's AOE agro holding and emergency mitigation capabilities. I really like that a LOT. I cannot possible stress that enough. I'm having more fun with this class than any other that I can remember in a very long time, and that's saying a lot.

AMS feels great vs caster bosses now. I really feel like an anti magic boss tank now. It seems like you guys took my old post very seriously (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8430104435&postId=84292961622&sid=2000#0).

Some other issues I have:

Blood of the North: I love this talent and I hate it. I don't think it's serving it's original purpose well at all, simply because obliterate is really, really lackluster right now. That, and death strike as frost is just terrible. :( I feel compelled to take it, though, because it will give me more frost and unholy runes (mostly frost that I care about for icy touch spam). Actually, I take it because it lets me basically get rid of blood runes for my next rotation. I might be alone, but I'm simply underwhelmed by both blood strike and obliterate. Every time I go through the double blood strike part of my rotations, I feel like I'm just doing it to go through the motions and get to the fun stuff. Blood strike and obliterate just aren't fun. That's really what it boils down to. Blood strike is one of my most used and required abilities for rotations, yet it's also one of the least fun. The only reason I really care about having a blood rune is for strangulate in PvP, and I say in PvP, because bosses are typically immune to strangulate in PvE.

Unbreakable Armor: I'd like to see this boring skill become a little more fun. Up the parry chance to 20% or so, and also give it a new, interesting mechanic. Such as: Enemies who strike you while active become frozen for 5 seconds, and are afflicted with frost fever (Howling blast and chillblains synergy anyone?). You know, make it fun! Right now it's just really boring to use, and I can't even tell if it's working all that well. I already have enough spell damage mitigation as frost from frost aura/presence, acclimation, and AMS. I'm OK with Unbreakable not working against spell damage, as long as it becomes more fun to use against melee.

Army of the Dead: I think the coolest part of this spell is the animation. :) Seriously though, it's obvious that it needs more tweaking. I don't like the channeling aspect, and I'm still unsure if I like the fact that they taunt things and just die in one hit. I also don't like the fact that they have about 3,600 HP and die to a single AOE. Could use some work.

Couple more screenies:

2008-08-26T17:55:00.004-06:00

Frost DK tanking + Stratholme with Arthas + Army of the Dead?

2008-08-26T01:57:00.007-06:00

Build used. (Obliterate sucks)

Part 1.

Part 2.

For what it's worth,

This isn't a fast run or speed clear by any means (which I tend to enjoy more). This was all of our first attempts at this instance, and it was just a pug. I went with a warlock buddy from Tich, Socio, and we just joined up with 3 random dudes.

You can see the disparity between tanking spell casting bosses and hard hitting bosses. The first boss was actually the toughest, mostly because he randomly shoots these chains at someone and stuns them for the duration. This makes the first boss fight much too reliant on having a resto druid healer (basically someone that can keep heals going while CCed). The chains effect is physical, so grounding totems don't work. It is rather funny to watch, though, since after I died, the other DK ressed me as a ghoul. I then ended up killing the boss like that. =]

The second boss was a pushover, as I could mitigate a ton of his damage.

I'm not really sure what the third boss did, but it didn't seem too bad.

The last boss lays out a lot of AOE magic damage, and randomly mind blasts/sleeps a target other than the tank. Acclimation is a huge boon here. In fact, I'm more inclined at this point to prefer acclimation over Anti-Magic Zone. As I've stated before in an earlier alpha synopsis, acclimation requires no runes, no global cooldowns, and is constantly being refreshed on you and your raid. It's fantastic, and it stacks with frost aura.

Frost DK grinding, Part 2!

2008-08-25T05:28:00.003-06:00

It didn't work out so well in terokkar without vendetta, but with it..

Oh man, do I LOVE this build for grinding mobs. :)

Watch, and be amazed.

Just for kicks, I'm adding a second video using the same build, but in unholy presence for faster rune consumption. You can see where the bigger up front burst of using unholy presence can come in handy, especially for PvP. :)

The second video is a bit longer, but is probably a better watch.

Enjoy.

Latest build = Lack of updates. :)

2008-08-24T16:10:00.004-06:00

Been way too busy actually playing/testing stuff to have time to do any updates. Only one more level to go..

Anyways, on with the feedback from the latest build.

First up is my thoughts on frost at this point. It's definitely a lot better, but nothing is ever perfect.

Here are some examples of why.

Also, if you liked that music I uploaded in my previous post, here is the entire MP3 Collection of northrend music up to this point.

Edit: God DAMN i love this Zul'Drak music. Eight hours straight looping it so far. Wow. I'm typically not a Derek Duke fan, but this stuff is amazing.

Storm peaks music = Massive Win, Blizzard.

2008-08-21T23:14:00.002-06:00

Here's a sample of the fantastic new music that Blizzard has created for us in the latest zone: Storm Peaks.

I absolutely love it.

Preliminary Frost DPS results

2008-08-21T22:41:00.004-06:00

Keep in mind the mob is below 35% pretty much the entire time, so that greatly skews the results. The results aren't that much different than what blood was getting last patch, if you take away some of the skewed DPS due to the mob being under 35% the entire test run. It just seems really powerful due to the big burst hits, I think.

Frost Feedback Consolidation Post:

2008-08-21T17:31:00.002-06:00

Warning, this initial post is not for the squeamish. =]
Frost has issuez, I may has answerz.

Dig it.

New WotLK Cinematic!

2008-08-21T10:32:00.001-06:00

For those of you who want to see it in high quality, without having to use the Blizzard downloader, I have uploaded it to filefront for your viewing pleasure.

It really must be seen this way to be truly appreciated.

Enjoy.

Proposed Icy Touch Fix:

2008-08-21T00:45:00.001-06:00

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.

Current Wishlist of Changes for the DK:

2008-08-20T23:58:00.001-06:00

Here it is.

This will be updated and modified as changes roll out, and changes are made. Three of my unholy wishes have already been granted!

DPS screenshots for forum discussion purposes :)

2008-08-20T19:44:00.007-06:00

There you go. Heart strike DPS using deathstrike for DRM with another DK. That's 4 diseases up, and 6 with both DRW out.

2200 DPS in green gear is nothing to sneeze at. That's average DPS, not burst. While using DRW, i'd say that it was roughly 3000 DPS for that window while it's out (while burning hyseteria), depending on how well my rune rotations were lined up.

Edit: This post is going to end up a new screen shot repository over the next week or two, so it will be updated constantly.

Blood Plague will be useful against HoT classes:

2008-08-19T15:17:00.004-06:00

Looks like Blizzard liked my idea.

Here's the official response.

Sounds like Unholy Blight (since it spreads blood plague around) will finally have a lot of PvP use. =]

If i'm not mistaken, this is going to be in addition to the initial removal of one hot or stack of lifeblooms on the initial plague/scourge strike. Update: Looks like it will be. (in addition)

Tanking Drak Keep as Unholy:

2008-08-18T19:11:00.004-06:00

So how easy is it to tank Drak'Theron Keep as unholy? This easy.

Here was my build. As you can see, it's pretty easy to hold AOE agro as unholy, which is the way I like it.

I absolutely hate single target pulling, as it seems to make instances drag on for way longer than necessary. That's why I love to tank as unholy. So many juicy AOE talents. Unfortunately, Corpse Explosion is bugged and wouldn't let me use it on nearby undead corpses via auto target, and manually targeting corpses with 7 mobs in your face is a pain in the ass.

Overall I like it a lot. I had about 12% parry, 8% dodge, 16k armor, and 3 oh shit buttons with Lichborne, IBF, and Bone armor.

Combine that way multiple ways to grab and hold onto AOE agro, and instances get cleared very quickly.

Also I might note: I was doing roughly 1500 DPS the entire instance, while in frost presence. Granted, that probably has to do with the hunter serpent sting bug (targets take a ton more damage with serpent sting up right now for some reason). However, I was still #1 on damage with another 77 DK who was blood, a 75 hunter, and a 76 warlock with me. The paladin was holy.

It's also quite possibly the most gorgeous instance in the game thus far.

The music you hear is just some of Matt Uelmen's work from Naxx. Too bad he's no longer with the company. :/

Edit: Forgot to mention something. I tanked this instance using full green/blue DPS gear. Not one piece of defense gear was used. =]

Three new threads that hopefully get looked at:

2008-08-18T15:03:00.001-06:00

Issues with early frost talents:
Blood attack rotations:
Runeforging issues and concerns:

Probably too much to post here, so I just tossed up the links. If you can't access the links, I'll probably put each topic in it's own blog entry at request.

I realize some of you are accessing this stuff while working, and thus you might not have access to the wow forums. =]

Not that I ever do that..

Blood @ 77.

2008-08-16T01:12:00.003-06:00

Towards the end of the video, I take on a 3man quest elite mob that's pretty rough. General Abbendis of the Scarlet Onslaught in New Hearthglen.

I love blood. It's just about perfect.

Edit: Sorry, this was the build.

It was as of the latest build, 8788

Latest beef: Frost is weak, blood is too strong:

2008-08-15T00:18:00.001-06:00

It's way, way too much feedback to write up on a single blog post.

If you're interested in reading, I humbly recommend you simply go follow this thread.

Blood worms feedback:

2008-08-14T10:18:00.001-06:00

They just haven't worked well since alpha. Their pathing and AI sucks. You obviously aren't going to give us a pet bar for them and let us control them. They're weak to AOE damage, minimally useful in coordinated pvp, useless while tanking, and mildly useful (but ultimately low on priority) for raiding. You're better off skipping them to min/max for raiding.

From what I've noticed, the only thing that they are REALLY good for is soloing elite quests. That's really it, and it's a pretty poor end game use.

So just scrap 'em.

Give us a new talent that would be more universally useful in more situations, and not just for leveling.

What about something like an improved death strike?

3/3 points: Every time you score a critical strike, you have a 33% chance to gain imp. death strike buff (whatever you want to call it). This makes your next two death strikes cost no runes.

There you go. Similar healing, useful without poor pathing and AI, controllable, no blood worms running around getting themselves killed and pulling adds.

Get crazy creative with the proc method, but it might be time to just scrap the little worm guys and turn a new useful ability (the new deathstrike) into something more useful via a mid blood talent. This would also share wonderful synergy with death rune mastery, and set up for some nice burst.

They're just currently pretty "meh" once you get capped out in levels, and start assuming end game roles.

Blood worms are like the new vendetta (and they've made vendetta basically obsolete), but a lot better, and don't require a KB. That's great, but I just don't see these guys being all that useful later on. It certainly does add a lot of flavor to the class, don't get me wrong. I love the blood worms when I'm farming, leveling, or taking on elite mobs. Heck, they're even OP in 1v1.

I just think that you could get a lot better use out of free death strikes (which would become free blood runes via DRM, which do fantastic damage via heart strike, which would become free crit death coils via sudden doom, which would become free bloody vengeance procs). That kind of synergy is really hard to overlook, and would provide far more use for end game scenarios in just about any situation.

Again, just my opinion.

Virulence needs a change:

2008-08-11T23:09:00.005-06:00

Link.

Edit: Scratch that. Blizzard fixed the problem a completely different way.

"As far as a PvP- snare ability goes, we are going to try something like removing the cooldown and root from Chains of Ice. It will drop the target's movement to zero, and the target will regain 5% movement speed per sec for 20 sec (10 in PvP). It's a physical debuff that cannot be dispelled and isn't subject to diminishing returns. Let us know how it goes. If it's too spammy now, we can put a cooldown back on it."

Plague and Scourge Strike Idea:

2008-08-11T14:47:00.001-06:00

Link.

Pretty self-explanatory.

Update: Looks like this change might happen.

New death strike doesn't mesh well in pvp rotations:

2008-08-11T10:58:00.004-06:00

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765569824&postId=87647137797&sid=2000#70

It's really, realy rare that I can get a decent deathstrike off on someone in pvp as it is right now due to the rune costs on top of the disease dependencies.

It costs 1 frost and 1 unholy rune right off the bat to get both diseases going, and death strike costs another 1 frost 1 unholy rune. This means that in a 10 second rotation in pvp, I can either:

1) Apply both diseases and get a death strike off, or
2) Keep my enemy snared via chains of ice (no frost fever) and actually have another unholy rune available for things like bone armor, AMS, or another plague strike to deal with a HoT.

If I use icy touch > plague strike, and death strike at some point in that rotation, I won't be able to use chains of ice (not an option in pvp). If I open with chains of ice, I can't apply frost fever and use death strike in the same rotation. If I open with chains of ice and death strike, the heal is pretty damn weak, so I feel compelled to get frost fever on, but then I can't use death strike at all. It's very frustrating.

I can't use my pvp abilities in the same rotation and expect to use death strike, simply because of the overlapping rune costs. It's simply too costly, which sucks, because I was really looking forward to being able to use death strike in a pvp scenario.

For these reasons, and those listed in the post, I'd really, really like to see death strike be swappable with blood strike in a standard rotation (1 blood rune). You have the option to do extra damage, or to heal yourself. Seems more reasonable that way, especially if you unhinge the OP blood worms from death strike in blood.

There are simply too many dependencies to make it worth while, and then when you get to that point, you won't have the runes if you also need to keep your target snared (which is obviously a must in pvp). The frost rune cost on death strike, if anything, really needs to go. I say blood rune is a good candidate because I often really don't care about using blood strike that much in pvp.

You can watch that pvp video I linked and see how many times I was able to get a decent death strike off. (read: Zero)

The deathstrike (and obliterate, for that matter) rotations work well in PVE because you don't have to worry about using chains of ice all the time, or another unholy rune ability (which a lot of pvp abilities tend to be), simply because those fights aren't as dynamic as PvP fights. You don't have to worry about mobs running away from you (chains of ice), catching Hots (plague/scourge strike), or bursting you down (AMS/Bone Shield/AMZ).

Please fix this.

Bit of PvP with the new BG:

2008-08-09T18:37:00.004-06:00

It was ok I guess. Here's the link. Not sure If I dig the new BG or not. You can get in this machine that runs faster than everyone and AOE fireblasts people for 3k a pop, 2 second cooldown, and the machine has about 50k health, immune to snares, etc. It's alright I guess, but it is a bit cheesy to be in an intense and heated moment of PvP just to get blown up by some random fireball from 100 yards away.

This battleground also introduces a new element of PvD, or player vs door. You have to pelt these doors along the way with the machines about 10 times each or so. Yes, you HAVE to use one of those vehicles. I'd almost prefer being able to DPS my way through the door, similar to how it's done in WC3.

Ah well. Blood DKs aren't doing too badly overall. Here is a screenshot of my final damage/KBs.

If you're wondering how I feel about the overall state of our performance in the BG's, I've summed it up here.

Initial patch thoughts:

2008-08-09T13:45:00.002-06:00

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? :(

New Blood DK vs 74 Elite with 104,000 HP.

2008-08-09T11:02:00.004-06:00

A patch ago, this guy would wipe the floor with me. I watched in awe as a feral druid soloed him down.

Now, it was my turn.

The self-sustainability of a blood DK right now with the deathstrike + blood worms change is pretty phenomenal. As long as the target isn't hitting me for 1/3 of my life per swing, I can tank something indefinitely, sort of like a warlock. =]

This was my spec.

New Patch Inc. =]

2008-08-08T15:38:00.002-06:00

Good times.

Fantastical Use of Death Grip:

2008-08-08T07:04:00.001-06:00

You're going to enjoy this.

Also, this 77 rogue who decided to show up and counter gank me ended up sampling dirt from all over hellfire peninsula.

Unholy presence concern:

2008-08-05T12:32:00.003-06:00

Posted here.

Sorry for the slower posting lately. I just started a new IT contract job so I haven't had as much free time lately.

Latest ideas to improve the DK:

2008-08-03T12:22:00.005-06:00

Link.

Most people seem to be pretty receptive to these. Let's see what Blizzard thinks.

My current stats in mostly green northrend gear:

2008-08-02T09:23:00.001-06:00

Blood strike scales extremely, extremely well

2008-08-02T08:06:00.001-06:00

PvP is an unholy rune hog:

2008-08-01T07:01:00.001-06:00

Here are my ideal fixes as of this writing to help balance this issue out, making the DK a much more fluid and viable PvP class.

This was my final pvp feedback from the alpha:

2008-08-01T00:41:00.000-06:00

So many of us on the Lich King realm took part in a friendly PvP session consisting of a lot of duels and some 3v3 matches near the nagrand arena. It was a lot of fun, but also educational as far as class mechanics stand right now.

I went with a 0/34/32 build with Unbreakable armor, chillblains, howling blast, deathchill, frigid dreadplate, and down to anti magic zone/bone armor in unholy.

The Good:

Anti Magic Zone is incredibly useful. Yes, I can still be afflicted by magical CC's, but if I'm getting hammered by lots of spells, it's a VERY useful safehaven to retreat into while I wait for runes to recharge, or to counter big incoming spell cooldowns, such as a PoM Pyro. I can see this single talent being the sole reason to spec unholy for pvp, purely for the sake of going against casters. This is THE single best anti caster ability in the game right now. Wow. Incredible. It eats any incoming magical damage cast on me until the 30s duration is up, or it eats 10,000 magic damage, whichever comes first.

Lichborne is fantastic, and got the changes it needed. I can use it to break out of fear AND deathcoil, (since it technically makes you undead, and undead are immune to deathcoil), and it's off the gcd and costs no runes. That means you can actually use it as an emergency, on demand ability as it should be. Fantastic talent. The risks associated with being shackled/turn evil should be a fine counter. You trade being immune to a couple types of CC to being vulnerable to another. I.e. A deathknight who breaks out of a shadowpriests new horror effect "fear" bomb with lichborne now runs the risk of then being shackled by a skilled priest that drops shadowform. Seems fair. Given the trade off, though, it might need a lower cooldown to 3 minutes. 5 minutes is a bit much. If there was no downside to using the ability, 5 minutes would be more acceptable.

Chillblains makes my icy touch do what chains of ice should do: Snare the target so I can actually catch people for just long enough for me to do meaningful damage sometimes. Both Chains of Ice and Chillblains will be rather useless vs druids, though. Any non-spammable snare really is. Chillblains with icy touch is arguably better than chains of ice would be even with the shorter duration. Why? Because it does damage in addition to snaring, and it slows their attack/casting speeds, and it can crit, and it doesn't have a ridiculous 20 second cooldown. Even if the proposed Chains of Ice to 1 rune change goes in, I would still say that Chillblains with icy touch is far better. However, neither of those really solve the issue of keeping someone snared that can shapeshift, or dispel themselves. I still feel incredibly kitable even with chillblains, and it sucks. As a side note: I noticed that if you dispel chains of ice off yourself, it will THEN apply the snare debuff, so to get rid of chains of ice while rooted, you will have to dispel yourself twice to regain movement speed. Not sure if that's working as intended.

Frigid Dreadplate + Unbreakable Armor is absolutely fantastic vs warriors. I'm in greens and I can take down my fully geared s3 geared warrior buddy, who's dual wielding season 3 2hand weapons no problem. Between my great melee mitigation and combination of strikes + spell damage that cuts through armor, taking down warriors really isn't that difficult at all. This was probably my easiest fight.

The Bad:

Bone Armor needs some work. I really love the concept of this ability: In theory, it's great against things that hit slow and hard. What comes to mind when I think of that besides warriors? Mages and warlocks. It cuts dot damage nearly in half, which is very useful, and it cuts those big mage bolts in nearly half. So what's the problem, you ask? It's dispelable and spell stealable. I figured I had the one up on an arcane mage I was fighting by popping this up as he put up arcane power, thinking I'd be able to negate a lot of damage on his next spells. Not the case, sadly. He simply spell stole it, and it made me have a much harder time killing him. Warlocks simply devour it off of me within 1s of the start of the fight. This really needs to be a physical buff. Also, I have to wonder. Why does this have a double rune cost, but something that's obviously MUCH more powerful like anti magic zone, simply costs 1 unholy (which I like, btw). 1 frost 1 unholy for 40% reduction on the next 4 hits vs 1 unholy for 10,000 magic damage reduction for everyone under my safe bubble? Definitely doesn't seem proportionate.

All the ghoul talents = worthless for arena/duels. I could see them being midly entertaining in the battlegrounds. That's about it. I really feel like these need some work. They're still way too much of a pain in the rump to keep around, and I don't feel like wasting 8 points in unholy to make them worthwhile, if they're still going to be 100% useless in arenas/raids. That makes those 8 talent points not fun. If you're going to keep ghouls non arena/raid friendly, then those talents that buff the ghouls REALLY need to give great secondary benefits as well. I don't consider 5% strength to be worth 5 talent points at all in situations where I can't use the ghoul. 10%? Maybe, but still doubtful, especially when you consider how useful the other talents (such as unholy command) are in the context of something like the arena.

Shadow of Death I still don't like. 1% to all stats is a little deceiving. It's really just 1% to str/stam/agility. Nothing to really get excited over. Fun talent to use a few times, but the passive bonus is just very unexciting.

Corpse Explosion: Same thing here. Absolutely useless in arenas. I would probably never pick this up. That's really 3 talent points to make it decent that do nothing in competitive pvp. Fun for 5mans, though. Gets a nice "wow" factor when you use it in groups that haven't seen it. Pain in the ass to target corpses still, too. Too frustrating and situational for me to convince myself to pick up.

Also, I feel like the early tiers of blood really don't have much to offer for pvp utility. It's a bunch of nice passives that increase your crit, parry, or AP. That's great I suppose. But, it's not nearly as useful as things like Anti magic zone, chillblains, unbreakable armor, so I feel like those early blood talents just don't have enough to compete. In addition, speccing deep into blood makes you even easier to kite, so I tend to just shy away from the blood tree completely for pvp. It has way too many passives, some of which are very situational, and a lot of which require on scoring a KB, which are obviously useless in the arena. Talents such as vendetta and butchery that are must-haves for leveling, suddenly become obsolete and you never look at them again.

I still FIRMLY believe that death grip needs to cost a fixed amount of runic power instead of using an unholy rune. I find myself chasing after enemies often with a bunch of runic power saved up, and I try my best to save my unholy runes for a well-timed bone armor, a degeneration (If it worked. I'll get to that), plague strike.. I am going to plead with you devs and ask that you consider playing around with DG using RP instead. I REALLY hate how it uses an unholy rune in PVE even more than PvP. I pull a loose mob back to me, but every lost unholy rune is lost dps, and lost ability to apply diseases that I could then spread with a blood rune for a blood boil. I feel as if it really limits my dps/tanking rotation for the next 10 seconds once that unholy rune is down.

Degeneration appears to be broken, as it's currently not negating the effect of any druid hots I tried countering when fighting a balance druid.

Anti Magic Shell: I must say, this ability is pretty underwhelming. It only grants 11 runic power when it absorbs a spell? Really? That's kind of a let down. It doesn't stop any magical CC's. This ability is best used as a reactive ability to incoming cast-time nukes. I always have to keep an unholy rune handy just in case I manage to catch or counter a spell coming at me. Eh, I dunno. It's ok. It's not nearly as cool as I thought it was going to be. It holds no candle to anti magic zone, which is understandable I suppose.. But Anti Magic Shell just feels underwhelming at the moment. You spend an unholy rune for 5s worth of protection from some magical abilities (not all), and the amount of RP you absorb feels pathetic. This ability seems merely gimmicky at the moment. It pales in comparison to warrior shield reflect, which only costs 25 rage (easily gained with stuff beating the crap out of you and nuking you while you hit things), has only a 10 second cooldown, is technically 100% spell damage reduction, and it reflects (obviously) the spell back at the caster. Seriously. What the hell? Warriors base anti magic ability is far superior to anti magic shell in nearly ever way. Why? Oh, and spell reflect DOES stop magical CCs, in addition to spells. Not only that, but it reflects them. It's a very valid tactic to have warriors time it to reflect sheep back at mages. Sigh. Pretty disappointed with this ability so far.

Finally, I'm going to bring up something I've mentioned in another thread, but I feel as if it needs to be repeated and re-emphasized: Annihilation talent in frost needs to be moved to unholy.
There are a few reasons for this, so please hear me out:

First, a great tactic for deep frost builds is to lay into someone with a bunch of spells and strikes (this includes disease-based strikes), obliterate to remove the diseases, and then pop hungering cold. Then you can let your runes charge up while your target is frozen, pop a deathchill + howling blast + more strikes for great burst. This doesn't work, however, if you take annihilation. In addition, beyond combos like this, deep frost builds typically don't/won't use obliterate much. Finally, I find myself not wanting to use those big damage obliterates while specced deep unholy, simply because I hate losing all those debuffs I worked so hard at putting up, ESPECIALLY while specced for ebon plague bringer. If you are specced EP at the moment, you simply should not obliterate ever, even though obliterate is designed to best be used on heavy disease-afflicted targets. Is using obliterate and wiping those diseases + stat loss + 9% increased magic damage taken on the target worth snagging 800 more damage off of an obliterate vs another strike? No, of course not.

It's for these reasons that I firmly believe that annihilation would be a talent best served in the unholy tree.

I think that about wraps things up for feedback for this build. Hope this is useful to someone

And even more:

2008-08-01T00:40:00.001-06:00

1) Presences:

My primary concern is going to mostly be blood vs unholy, since frost is essentially for tanking. My biggest concern is how valuable the 0.5s gcd is going to be vs 15% damage caused via blood presence, which is just absolutely huge.

Your auto attack DPS will be the same, (15% extra haste = 15% extra damage), so the real question lies in the 15% damage via your specials vs the ability to pump out those specials quicker. It's too early to tell right now just how valuable that faster gcd will be, but I can definitely see the benefits. Sure, your first plague strike might do 15% more damage in blood presence, but your second one is going to take 50% longer to hit (1.5s gcd vs 1.0s) the target. In addition, it can be pretty game-breaking to be caught mid-gcd and unable to interrupt that game-winning heal because you were in blood presence instead of unholy. Time will tell, but obviously not many people will be using unholy presence just yet, as pvp is all but dead right now on the alpha servers. There's just no point to using unholy aura right now, so it isn't going to get the testing and feedback it needs just yet.

2) PvP:

As someone who held a 3v3 team on BG9 with some notable players with a 2300+ rating in season 2, and had several other teams that were 2200+ in 2v2 and 5v5, I take this area very seriously.

First and foremost, let's talk about mobility:

Unholy aura seems like a fantastic talent, but it's position in the tree makes it mutually exclusive to several other builds/trees. 10% Extra run speed for the group that will stack with your run speed enchant seems almost required, especially in a tree that has such amazing pvp talents such as bone armor, anti magic zone, unholy command (yes, 10s lower cooldown on death's grip is huge), on a pale horse, and lichborne. The initial problem with ret paladins was their issue of getting kited all over the place. This was solved in part due to the pursuit of justice talent relatively early in ret (even though I think more paladins than ret could really use this talent in pvp, especially holy). This talent would also be an assassination rogues' best friend, granting them a total of 25% movement speed increase.

Next we have chillblains, which seems required for one basic reason: Chains of ice has way too many drawbacks. Deathknights have 0 dispel protection for their frost abilities right now, and with chains of ice being so ridiculously expensive to use, in addition to its 20s cooldown (why?), I just don't see any frost build being successful in pvp without chillblains. This is essentially the frost tree's version of unholy aura, except it isn't really active 100% of the time. Once you factor in how ridiculously easy a lot of classes will be able to cleanse it, not to mention you can't exactly trinket out of getting chased by someone faster than you (as you would be faster than most with unholy aura), this talent becomes less attractive for your hardcore pvper, and even less so for your pver.

Death's grip will act as a wonderful "get back over here" type of ability, once our target makes his/her escape.. but as of right now, it's a little lackluster, as the target that was kiting me right before using it can typically run right back away, especially if I'm still snared. I wish this ability had a 1-2s root tacked onto it as well. There seems to be some lag when Using it. when I use it on pvp players, it takes them a few seconds to get pulled back to me as they fly through the air, and sometimes they land next to me out of melee range. Without unholy aura, using this ability in its current form does me absolutely zero good sometimes.

Speaking of death's grip, I would rather have this ability use 10 runic power instead of an unholy rune. I mean it's an ability that's essentially used in a situation like intercept, where you need to get back on your target, yes? So you more than likely already have a bunch of runic power to spend, and nothing really good to spend it on. I think DG would be an excellent ability to have use RP. Right now, all I really use it for is deathcoil spam, and I find myself wishing I had more interesting abilities to use it on. Not to mention, this would save an unholy rune and allow me to use my bone armor/anti magic shell/diseases more often. Wouldn't it make sense to use an unholy rune to eat that incoming spell via anti magic shell, which would charge your runic power, and use that RP to pull the caster towards you? Seems more logical to me to do it that way, rather than to spend an unholy rune eating that spell, and another to pull the caster towards you, and then use all that runic power on..... a deathcoil? And then not have any unholy runes available to bone armor/disease.. Please consider this change.

Chains of ice I won't really touch on that much, as I feel this ability has too many restrictions placed on it. Double rune cost, 20 second cooldown, and absolutely 0 dispel protection make this ability a lot weaker in practice than it looks on paper. Even if it only cost 1 frost rune, and had 0 cooldown, I could still see a lot of classes simply trinketing out, or dispelling it off of themselves or their teammates. Is it really so OP to have so many restrictions? If anything, I think this is another one of those abilities that would probably be better off using a discreet amount of runic power, rather than runes.

3) Runic Power PvP Utility:

I can't stress this enough. Death knights have essentially ZERO utility via runic power for pvp builds right now, other than deathcoil spam and the occasional icebound fortitude. Ok, so as an anti caster, I have one single ability (which is essentially pummel), that uses runic power. That's it. I feel like our control/utility type abilities of chains of ice and death's grip would be much better off if they used discreet amounts of runic power. It feels incredibly boring to only really have deathcoil and the occasional mind freeze as your only option to use runic power on vs casters.

Use the 51 point talents you say? I could see possibly hungering cold be useful in pvp, but definitely not unholy blight. Dancing rune blade would be fun to use, if it weren't for the fact that deep blood builds (51+) have access to neither chillblains, nor unholy aura. Deep blood spec DKs will be the most easily kited melee class/spec in the game.

Even still, those 51 pointers are on lengthy cooldowns. Where is the utility between? I'm beginning to feel like that, vs casters, my runic power bar is essentially my deathcoil charging bar. At least vs melee, I have the option to use icebound fortitude every minute (which is still rather lengthy, considering the lack of variety of RP abilities).

Further early alpha feedback:

2008-08-01T00:36:00.003-06:00

I think I'm beginning to like the DK less and less the more I play it.

The more I realize how limited the rune/runic power mechanic is, the less fun it becomes, which is a pretty big red flag that something is wrong. I wish I could talk to you on vent about it sometime, eh but I know you're busy. Ah well, it is still early in the process.

Someone made some pretty valid points here that I gotta say I've noticed as well. And to tell the truth, with as much time as I spend simply chasing after my balance druid buddy that I duel all the time, I really really wish I had more ranged silences than strangulate which is on a 30s cooldown and needs all runic power to be worth a damn.

I also find myself wishing I simply had a single target CC of some sort... like.. an incapacitate, or a knock back, or a single target freeze, or something. Something frost based (but only if chains of ice was 1 rune cost, darnit!).

One last thing is, I feel like... I dunno... I don't have a big nuke or burst damage ability other than a death's chill + howling blast which is technically 3s and not on demand. You know? I mean I don't have this big scary mortal strike attack that I could bust out on someone, which is weird cause I keep seeing talents for this thing called "obliterate" but I have no idea what it is. I'm hoping that would address the issue. I feel like once I get close to chox (the druid), I just can't do enough damage in those few seconds between when I'm getting rooted to put any fear of death into him, while I get kited around and die to dots + nukes between strangulate.

I certainly don't feel like much of an anti caster at this point other than an Anti HoTer, since degeneration is splendid at countering hots. (kudos there!)

Part of being anti caster (who excels at ranged combat obviously) is either being able to constantly close the distance to them like a warrior or rogue, or have lots of ranged interrupts and ranged damage to match or scare them into thinking twice about standing there and nuking (ala hunter).

At this point, I'd also gladly give up mind freeze for earth shock, as the range on mind freeze is just pathetic.

I would also kill to have more runic power type abilities that were effective and weren't totally dependent on having a full bar to be worth it, as I find myself holding onto a full bar (wasting future RP generation) just for the right time for when I need to blow a strangulate, as it's on a 30s cooldown.

Developer response:

"Yeah, there are some valid points. It’s definitely still a possibility to change runic power abilities to use discreet amounts of power.

Aside from that, we do plan to get chains of ice down to 1 frost rune (possibly frost/unholy though)."

Early frost feedback from alpha:

2008-08-01T00:32:00.001-06:00

You may notice, after glancing over this, that several of these changes were indeed made:

1) There's still not enough synergy with frozen targets. We currently only have 3 ways to freeze a target. Random proc from mind freeze/icy touch, random proc from frost strike, and using our 1min cooldown hungering cold which requires 51 points in for the only guaranteed way to do it. So we get 2 random abilities that use up frost runes that MAY have a slight chance to freeze the target, and a long cooldown on demand one.

2) Once the target is frozen via mind freeze/icy touch/frost strike... then what? It lasts for maybe 3 seconds at best, and if you just used your last frost run, half of the time you can't even howling blast them before it wears off due it breaking on damage, no runes are available, and/or howling blast is on cooldown anyways. Soooo most of the time I see the target get frozen and say "neat", and that's about it, as I don't have enough tools to take advantage of it.

3) Hungering cold is fantastic. I really like this ability, I just wish I could use it more often. It's so strong, that I typically don't even need full runic power to use. I wish we had a single target version of this ability as a base ability.

4) Death's Chill needs to be off the global cooldown. So does Blood tap. It's beyond frustrating to find my target gets frozen and I wan't to pop a crit howling blast, but by the time I've waited for the gcd so I can howling blast, it's already broken. Same thing with needing an emergency frost rune via blood tap. It just takes too long to react to the situation due to GCD. I have to basically spend 3 seconds to get that emergency situation combo off, and by then, the situation is typically gone! Don't like it.

5) Howling blast is amazing, but I wish I had more tools that took advantage of a frozen target in someway. Doesn't have to be tripple damage to frozen targets ability, but something. Could be even single target. Also, it would be really nice if we had a runic power ability that could fill this role. It seems that most of the abilities that build up to the frozen target scenario (with the exception of hungering cold) require frost runes. It would be fantastic if we had the choice of doing rune-ability > runic power and vice versa to build our frozen target combos. Options are great, depending on the situation.

6) Icy talons needs to reduce gcd by the proper amount, since it's technically spell haste. I know someone already mentioned this, but it needs to happen.

7) Killing machine and unbreakable armor feel too bloated. Please consider 3/3 versions.

8) Endless winter feels like too weak of a talent. Perhaps if more talents were included to make it feel stronger, such as increasing the duration of your mind freeze interrupt/lockout, as well as making the effect of death's chill last a couple seconds longer to buy you time for another frost rune to perhaps recharge. Perhaps make this a 3/3 talent. Also needs to affect chillblains sorely.

9) New talent needed: Winters Reach: Increases the range of all frost spells and abilities by 10/20% Mind freeze especially needs this, but would also be a boost to the core ability of icy touch to the frost tree. Extra range on hungering cold/howling blast would be fantastic as well.

10) Frost Rune Mastery feels extremely week, and only really procs when you use hungering cold, meaning this talent doesn't really see a whole lot of benefit unless you're 51+ points in. Please change this.

11) One final thing: I really hate how hungering cold breaks on disease damage. Frost and Unholy don't get along very well. While level, we're taught that keeping diseases on as many targets as possible is a good thing. It allows us to blood boil when needed, and its a lot of extra threat. Now, once you train Hungering Cold from 51 frost, you're taught the opposite: Just in case you need to use it. I really find myself conflicted. Should I spread my diseases around (Ok, I probably could have worded that better), or should I not in case I need to pull an emergency HC out of my ass? I dunno. Feels counter productive, frustrating and more importantly: Not fun.

Early Deathknight Design Philosophies.

2008-08-01T00:22:00.005-06:00

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)."

Frost DK PVP

2008-07-31T22:18:00.003-06:00

So I uploaded a video to give a glimpse into what frost DK pvp is like right now. Against a warlock that won't spam you with curse of exhaustion (which is now awesome btw!), I can actually catch up to them and do substantial damage.

This isn't going to be an in depth look at how well we function vs each class. It's just me vs lemonayd (who is playing as destruction + soul link), and some random clips of how useful Hungering Cold can be in a pinch, and how hard hungering cold + howling blast combos can hit. Granted, it's really, really hard to find any sort of organized pvp on beta right now. There are no BGs or arenas, so you really have to go out and stir up trouble if you want to test some things as you go. I'm not sure if 4-6k howling blast crits will be OP at 80, but it sure is fun to 1shot a bunch of level 60 newbs that you can round up in one go.

Anyways, back to frost: My melee damage is still pretty good. I went with this build. It has RP generation that can't be beat thanks to chill of the grave and dirge. It also has cheaper RP usage due to runic power mastery. Annihilation is great for keeping the disease synergies up. Icy talons I find to be pretty worthless outside of single target DPS. It's not a pvp talent, and is in no way worth the talent sink of 10 points with imp icy touch > icy talons. If you can't be glued to your target, haste is pretty shitty. This fact is driven home even more when you find out how little of our damage is actually white damage. Death chill not only works on howling blast combos, but also frost strike and obliterates. Deathchill is the burst you should save for when your target gets low. Double crit obliterates can really mess someone up if you save up your runes.

Acclimation is great against casters, and will be even better in the arean. Each stack adds 50 resist to the school that it procced off of, so if a warlock/shadow priest combo starts dotting you up, you AND your party be sitting at around at least 150+ shadow resist in no time. I also believe this affects party pets as well. This can actually be more effective and scale better than anti-magic zone. It requires no GCDS or resources such as runes or RP to activate. It's simply passive goodness. If this was changed to be made raid-wide, it would secure a spot for frost DK tanks in any AOE-intensive fight in pve, as Anti-magic zone only absorbs so much, in a limited area, consumes an unholy rune, and has a 2 minute cooldown.

Guile of Gorefiend is one of my favorite talents in the tree. However, they need to remove the crit damage bonus from mind freeze, and replace it with howling blast, if not icy touch. It's a great offensive + defensive talent in one. Letting icebound fortitude last 18 seconds instead of 12 is actually a very noticeable bonus. It's 18 seconds of taking 50% less damage from ALL sources, AND being immune to stuns. Take that, warrior RNG!

Hungering cold I could see being pretty clutch in the arena after people blow their trinkets. It's essentially an AOE hunter freezing trap. Any damage breaks the blocks of ice, and it's a wonderful way to set up some nasty combos in coordinated pvp, or to simply use as emergency CC. Think of it as an AOE repentance that lasts 10 seconds in PVP, and 26 seconds in pve with runic power mastery. My only gripe is that it uses your entire runic power bar. I wish it had a 60 RP cost (bringing it down to just under 50RP with runic power mastery), and lasted the full 10 seconds as well. In addition, it would be nice if it had a short 2-3 second "defrosting" period where people gradually recover full movement/attack speed. During this time, it would still be possible to land some combos via howling blast/frost strike. It IS a 51 point talent after all.

The other nice thing about this build, is that it's also pretty good for tanking as well. You won't be a 25man tank with this spec, but you will be very effective at 5mans and maybe even 10mans. Time will tell.

Video.

Waste of Beta Keys.

2008-07-31T16:19:00.003-06:00

Nothing drives me crazier than shit like this.
Seriously, who the hell lets assholes like this in, when we could get someone useful instead? :/

It's probably a good thing that I don't have the powers to, uhm, uninvite people.

Jayde has been immortalized in Ebon Hold:

2008-07-29T12:00:00.002-06:00

New runeforging enchant:

2008-07-28T23:04:00.003-06:00

Cindierglacier got a nice buff.

And frost strike is broken:

Then again:

That's a huge jump in damage, depending on what's currently afflicting the target.

Chains of ice & Unholy Blight thoughts/feedback

2008-07-28T22:15:00.002-06:00

Let me know what you guys think:

Chains of Ice.

Unholy Blight.

Beta patch inc:

2008-07-28T16:03:00.001-06:00

I'm looking forward to seeing all the new changes coming. =]

Source.

Deathstrike will probably be changed:

2008-07-27T10:24:00.001-06:00

All it takes is a little persuasion.