i've read the newest post of Ghost with the changes to Frost Strike etc..
could you somehow get a blue answer how this whole freeze stuff should work on bosses?
Bosses usually are not freezable.. It would be awesome if the freeze was just a sideeffect but we gain some sort of unique debuff (frozen to the core) or something similar so our synergies keep working when fighting freeze immune bosses..
If frost tree is suppose to be our tank tree, then why would we ever want to snare / freeze in PvE in the first place. It does nothing other than to hinder things, especially on the pull when your main target gets snared and the rest of the pack gets there first. Sort of like how I see the daze effect on Avenger's sheild worthless as well. What are your thoughts on this, Leiah?
If this class is supposed to tank anything outside of 10 mans we need a solid tanking tree. Blade Barrier was great together with the old Unbreakable Armor.
I'm still missing the sense of a melee class relying on freeze effects for Pvp and PvE
As am I, all freezing targets does is make mobs attack any other person that is close to them if their main threat target is out of melee range. Freeze and chills are a poor choice for anything PvE tank based imo.
Completely unrelated, but have you had time to play with a DW build? I've been enjoying your videos and commentary, and there seems to be a lot of back and forth on the forums regarding the effectiveness of a DW build, so I'm curious as to whether you have tried one yet.
While we're looking at tweaking talents for more usability.
Infested corpse seems very one note to me. It's primary use is really only going to be for leveling. It would get a little life in pvp and pve when something dies but I was thinking something more like this:
"Infestation Rank 3 When an enemy takes damage from one of your diseases, it has a 30% chance of producing 3-5 Bloodworms. Bloodworms attack your enemies, healing you for the amount of damage they deal for 20 sec or until killed. This effect cannot happen more then once every 45 seconds."
This would allow it to work on bosses as well as in pvp with far more useful results and since we already have vendetta being an "on death" ability we shouldn't have another deeper in the tree.
I would put this on the beta DK boards but I don't have that key yet dang it!
Agree on that guy that sayed that if we want to tank anything past heroics (come on dude , do you really think that well tank KelThuzan 10-man with theese talents ? Nope. ) we WILL need a tree that is solid for tanking . Yes , Frost has already many mitigantion potencial talents . Yes , that unholy-ebon-plaguebringer-o-death will tank my 5man heroic if he has brains and gear for it . But Kel'Thuzie par expamle ? No, I think his frotbolt would shatter my ANS :P .
Solution ? - well , make frost a bit more of a durability tree , with more frost-effect controlabillity and burst potential. For blood , well make them Deaths masters of arms , continue the way of high parry and Will of teh necropolis needs to be buffed up to 50% of health , oh and nice self healing capability woudl be more than interesting for a tank ! Immagine : 3 dps , 1 BDK tank and 1 restokin (example for an off-healer) . Coul work! And unholy - make it the ultimate anti-caster build in the game ! Yes DKs are supposed to be utlimate anti-casters but give unholy the pinacle of it ;) . And some more of pyhsical mitigation wouldnt go astray ! (20 sec and 1 frostrune-only on Bone Armor? Souns nice with me )
Back on topic : Frost strike - ít NEEDs to be instant . For **** mercy , a heroic strike that costs a whole RUNE ? I'd rather wait that 1 sec for another Icy touch . As an instant attack that gets the bonuses of thundra staleker , FRW and glacial rot it deals some Mortal strik-ish damage, at the cost of a rune ? Fair trade . And for my comment on "frozen" effect on a boss , I wrote somewhere else that FS ot FRW should have an update talent that gives them a disease (lets call it Chillflue) . So this chillflue woudl "only" cause the target to be "frozen" (like the new frost mage talent) . Hence - it boosts all DK dps (its a disease) , boost frost DK signiicantly(its "frozen") and gives mages another raid-esque shatter-proccer.
My Death strike would look like as it is now but if ur target is below 20% hp it would deal 100% or 150% (i will let balancing the numbers to Blizz) weapon dmg (so it would also scale with gear) And it would be an executelike ablility and stil diferent from execute/hammer of wrath.
well posted. I read in the US Boards something like you have a Frost Mage etc.. i don't want to be forced to have a frost mage to allow me to work as frost specc.
On a side note:
I'm a big fan of your concept: Frost - migation, physical damage tanker Unholy - God of Aoe and anti magic Blood - big dps with high parry values
But someone who really wants to be a viable tank should be able to do so by speccing Frost in my opinion
Great stuff and amazing vids but is DW viable as of right now? (i know that most dk attacks are weapon % based) but could you possibly make a short vid for DW any spec?
I think, Death Strike should become a Strike to Kill... only useable under 20% Health of the Mob an completly converting RunePower to do more Damage more Rune Power you have. Like Execute from Warrior.
The entire instant attack system needs to be redesigned, as it stands Blood Strike is an inferior Obliterate, Degenerate is an inferior Plague Strike, Icy Touch and Frost Strike will be competing for Frost Runes and Frozen bonus damage and Death Strike is worthless.
Either instant attacks need to be consolidated, differentiated or moved to Runic Power.
On paper, Deathchill and Frost Strike looks over powered, I don't believe 100% + weapon damage instant attacks were intended to be a 1 Rune cost when compared to Obliterate and Plague Strike. Either Frost Strike needs to be reduced to a 60% weapon damage instant attack for 1 Rune cost, on par with Blood Strike, Death Strike and Degenerate or 2 Rune cost (1 Frost, 1 Unholy).
If both Frost Strike and Icy Touch share Frozen bonus damage, then you'll always use Frost Strike over Icy Touch because the damage coefficient will scale better for a weapon based attack. Since Frost specs are Frost rune starved, and Frozen Strike and Icy Touch are competing with each other for Frozen bonus damage, it makes sense to change Icy Touch from 1 Frost rune to 20 Runic Power if its main purpose is to debuff the opponent. This creates greater synergy between your abilities, because now Frost Strike can feed off of the Freeze procs from your utility abilities and your utility abilities can get Frozen damage bonuses when your Runes are on cool down.
Also, I'd like to see Frost Strike become trainable with a -50%, 10sec movement debuff ala Frostbrand so non-Frost specs can use a PVP snare. Either that or Chillblains needs another 2 ranks to make Icy Touch and Mind Freeze better snares , and Chillblains needs to be dropped to Tier 1 of the Frost tree.
It's ridiculous that Shamans have better movement debuffs than Death Knights, when Shamans have Ghost Wolf and Spectral Transformation to close distance and break snares. Death Knights need movement debuffs, so either movement debuffs should come standard on Frost abilities or movement debuffs should come talented on Frost abilities lower on the Frost tree. I'd also like to see more abilities under Frostbite for more freeze procs and Glacial Rot changed to increasing the damage of your abilities to frozen targets instead of diseased targets to give the Frost tree more synergy.
Blood Strike needs to be differentiated from Obliterate, instead of adding damage based on diseases it should just add health based on % of damage to give all talent specs Rune based regeneration. I'd also like to see Rune Tap and Improved Rune Tap come off the Blood talent tree, and then turn Rune Tap into a trainable ability that consumes Runic Power, because Death Knights don't have enough generic Runic Power dumps and no one in their right mind is going to put 3 talent points into Improved Rune Tap.
The suggestion for Blood Strike obsoletes Death Strike altogether, so I propose Death Strike and Degenerate be consolidated into one skill and become a -50%, 10sec healing debuff. Honestly, they just need to institute Unholy Embrace for the turn HoTs into DoTs and Absorption into Damage ability, because Degenerate is sub-par against half the healing classes.
I'm not really sure how to respond to your comment without sounding to harsh. But I'm really tired of reading all this stuff about people leveling to 60 or not even having set a foot in the beta.
First: "On paper, Deathchill and Frost Strike looks over powered, I don't believe 100% + weapon damage instant attacks were intended to be a 1 Rune cost when compared to Obliterate and Plague Strike. Either Frost Strike needs to be reduced to a 60% weapon damage instant attack for 1 Rune cost, on par with Blood Strike, Death Strike and Degenerate or 2 Rune cost (1 Frost, 1 Unholy)."
The thing is that Obliterate does FAR more damage and allways will do when you gear in the right way.
For the actual beta Obliterate eats ALL diseases and stackwise on the target. Do the math or look at leiahs pics. It does quite some good damage.
Once you are armor penetration capped Frost Strike looses the whole benefit of ignoring armor and doing frost damage.
Aside from that 2 rune costs let you sit rune starved nearly all of the time. If you had ever specced that tree you would know how fucked up Frost is atm with the whole frozen theme. Frost Strike is a good ability of course but its a 41 Talent. Compare it to other 41 talents like Heart Strike, Frost Elemental or Crusader Strike and you see there is nothing bad about it.
The combination with Death Chill seems to me to be another version of Pom Am Pyro shizzl from my POV.
Maybe making Frost Strike more like devastate (hit with both weapons) would suit this more in favoring DW and cutting a little bit on the burst by maybe adding a 3 second CD so that you can't spam it with Death Chill. But it needs to stay 100% 1 Rune and pure Frostdamage.
Its a good tank tool allowing me to DW and i don't need another low damage instant attack that won't let me hold aggro.
Mangle is better than Claw there no big deal about it.
"The entire instant attack system needs to be redesigned, as it stands Blood Strike is an inferior Obliterate, Degenerate is an inferior Plague Strike, Icy Touch and Frost Strike will be competing for Frost Runes and Frozen bonus damage and Death Strike is worthless."
Blood Strike is FAR better when talented and specced for Blood with rune mastery and Sudden Doom. It's rune / damage ratio is far better than Obliterate while not eating your diseases. Obliterate is for Unholy specced Dks speccing Annihiliation where it really shines.
Degenerate is a HoT Remover for Pvp and a disease giver for tank specced Dk or unholy Dks spamming Obliterate (see above) You won't use Plague Strikes twice in a circle as the dot does good damage when it ticks.
Icy Touch and Frost Strike really share some problem. It's the whole fucked up freeze shit going on in this tree that does not work once you hit raid bosses with it and works against you class with freezes breaking on diseases and mobs loosing aggro once you move (yes i know you can bloodboil them but that should not be its main use). Aside from that i guess we have to say bye to IT being a good dps tool like it was in Alpha. It seems to be meant as a debuff once every second cycle. The only thing really not fitting in is Killing Machine. Once i got decent Northrend gear I started to crit like crazy.
As for Death Strike. Yeah this skill sucks but i'll wait for the change
I'm still hoping someone at Blizzard really moves the Frost tree more towards tanking as this whole every specc can tank thing really won't work well since tanking is about migation and the Dk really misses this in his skills and talents when compared to the three other tank specced classes.
"Once you are armor penetration capped Frost Strike looses the whole benefit of ignoring armor and doing frost damage." -Saitoz
Saitoz, I'm not sure what you mean here but I daresay it's not accurate. There is not enough armor penetration available to come anywhere close to reducing all enemy targets to zero armor.
That warrior with 10,000 armor is reducing your physical damage by almost 50% at level 70. Convert the attack to Frost and you're doing 100% damage, which is effectively double.
Excellent comment guys. And yes Saitoz, I share a lot of your concerns. I've already brought up most of them internally, if not on the alpha/beta forums, to my blizz contact. ;)
perhaps i should really add that I'm looking from a PvE perspective, since from my experience in Pvp speccs like Death Chill + FrostStrike spam are comparable to Arcane Power Pom Pyro Speccs or a combat rogue pressing Adrenalin Rush.
They are good in BGs but i doubt you ll see a Frostknight in serious Arena games since it offers nothing compared to Heart Strike and the tremendous self healing abilities of a Bloodknight or the whole lot of utility spells and talents owned by a Plagueknight.
So I looked at Frost from a PvE perspective and most melee classes in Sunwell are currently armorpenetration-capped since it's the best scaling stat endgame. Once you reach this level the Frost Strike looses its main benefits from a dps perspective.
@ leiah
glad to hear, i hope something comes up in the next time. But for now i'll wait till the patch. Maybe I'll create a little video showing the speccs and giving a little introduction to this class..
You will have to bear with my crude english :D
I have played around quite a bit with a triple specc dwing with Necrosis, Vendetta, and Killing Machine as the core talents which i found to be quite amusing.
I'm really puzzled where this whole DW thing is going to. From actual itemization DW seems to favor tanking since all actual tank weapons are onehand but who knows what will come up in Northrend (*hint* ashbringer with DEF Stats *hint* :D )
Of course Frost Strike isn't as good as Obliterate when Obliterate has diseases up, but in PvP situations where you don't have the time to cast diseases, Deathchill -> Frost Strike is front loading a lot of damage thru' an opponent's armor for a little cost. Frost Strike seems to be in between Bloodstrike and Obliterate, too good for 1 Rune instant attack and not good enough for 2 Rune instant attack.
I'll wait until Frost Strike becomes an instant attack until I pass judgment, but until then it's something I want to test before I write it off.
Yeah, Bloodstrike is reasonable when you have it talented and you have diseases stacked and you haven't Obliterated those diseases away, but the dissynergy between Bloostrike and Obliterate is profound for Blood and Unholy specs. If you rotate Icy Touch, Degenerate, Plague Strike and Obliterate then Blood Strike doesn't have a use, and if you rotate Degenerate, Plague Strike, Deatchill, Frost Strike and Obliterate you're still not using Blood Strike unless you proc a Blood Rune. So Blood Strike doesn't have a point unless your substituting it for Plagued Strike when it's disease is A) stacked and B) not consumed by Obliterate.
If Blood Strike is sub-optimal in DPS rotations compared to Obliterate, I'd rather Blood Strike have a non disease based ability. It is/will be the same for Degeneration and Death Strike depending on what abilities Death Strike gains. Perhaps a bleed effect for Blood Strike and a leach effect for Death Strike, so Blood Strike is a non disease source of DPS and Death Strike is an "oh shit" instant attack.
Summary, there needs to be 1 Rune or 2 Rune instant attacks that can break the "optimized" DPS rotations in favor of utility abilities and not secondary DPS instant attacks that you manage to "fit in" when it's convenient.
I'm indifferent towards Degenerate, but it feels as tho' DKs are being denied a reasonable Mortal Strike effect with Degenerate replacing Unholy Embrace.
Agreed on Frost tree, it's one part ice tree and one part protection tree, so the PvP and the PvE roles of the tree are conflicting with each other. Perhaps the damage mitigation abilities of the Blood and Frost trees should be moved to the bottom of the trees so you can just cross spec for all the damage mitigation abilities, and the offensive Blood talents and the "Mage" Frost talents can be moved up the tree. At least Blade Barrier could replace Improved Rune Tap in the Blood tree or Bone Armor and Unholy Rune Mastery could trade places in the Unholy tree.
I don't have a problem with the damage mitigation abilities in two separate trees, it's just how deep the damage mitigation abilities are that bothers me.
@Immolthar
The idea was to untalent Frost Strike and turn it into a trainable skill that consumes Frost runes. I agree not having a ranged Frost rune dump for Unholy specs is kind of irritating tho'.
i doubt you'll see a Frost specced Dk in a lot of Arena Games besides perhaps 2n2 with a Frost Mage.
And for me Frost Strike is a good source of aggro for one frost rune.
I guess you're right. We have to see the patch and do some test.
As I said I would be happy if Frost moved more towards DW and Frost Strike got something like Devastate like hitting with both weapons but skipping the + damage it has atm.
Sounds reasonable, altho' I'd have to see how DW affects instant strikes before I'd be agreeable. I have serious doubts about Blizzard being able to normalize DPS between 2H and DW tho', as it stands I'd rather be able to equip a Shield than DW.
Granted Death Knights are ASStastic in PvP ATM, but I don't see Blood spec or Unholy spec being viable either. We need mobility, we need snares, we need a cleanse and we need anti-Healer abilities to be competitive.
Chillblains needs 5 ranks and should affect all Frost abilities and spells, Anti-Magic Shield needs to remove magic based debuffs or Icebound Fortituted needs to make us immune to Freezes and Chills, and we need more than Degenerate for anti-Healer abilities.
An interesting proposal I've seen is to have an Unholy based curse that converts all healing spells into damage spells on the target and then counts the target as a friendly target for healing spells, so you can turn your healers into DPSers for X seconds.
We just need another mobility skill, I'd take a Charge with a 30 second cool down for a Blood rune or a Sprint with a 2 minute cool down for an Unholy rune etc.
PvP needs a lot of band aids, because Death Knights just aren't viable.
33 comments:
fits better here
Hey Leiah
i've read the newest post of Ghost with the changes to Frost Strike etc..
could you somehow get a blue answer how this whole freeze stuff should work on bosses?
Bosses usually are not freezable..
It would be awesome if the freeze was just a sideeffect but we gain some sort of unique debuff (frozen to the core) or something similar so our synergies keep working when fighting freeze immune bosses..
-Saitoz-
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8430364457&postId=84291969054&sid=2000#6
Done.
My hero <3
I really wish I could post in US Boards
-Saitoz-
If frost tree is suppose to be our tank tree, then why would we ever want to snare / freeze in PvE in the first place. It does nothing other than to hinder things, especially on the pull when your main target gets snared and the rest of the pack gets there first. Sort of like how I see the daze effect on Avenger's sheild worthless as well. What are your thoughts on this, Leiah?
That's the thing: We're not supposed to have a "tank" tree.
Ya considering they put Toughness, Frigid Dreadplate, & Unbreakable Armor in the frost tree. I don't see their logic on the PvE side of things.
If this class is supposed to tank anything outside of 10 mans we need a solid tanking tree. Blade Barrier was great together with the old Unbreakable Armor.
I'm still missing the sense of a melee class relying on freeze effects for Pvp and PvE
-Saitoz-
As am I, all freezing targets does is make mobs attack any other person that is close to them if their main threat target is out of melee range. Freeze and chills are a poor choice for anything PvE tank based imo.
@ cyle
100% agree. especially if you have to move a little bit the freezes will prove contraproduvtive (i hope this word exists in english :D )
-Saitoz-
Yeah exactly, Leiah maybe you could bring this up on beta forums, and include your thoughts as well.
Completely unrelated, but have you had time to play with a DW build? I've been enjoying your videos and commentary, and there seems to be a lot of back and forth on the forums regarding the effectiveness of a DW build, so I'm curious as to whether you have tried one yet.
Another video wouldn't be remiss either :P
While we're looking at tweaking talents for more usability.
Infested corpse seems very one note to me. It's primary use is really only going to be for leveling. It would get a little life in pvp and pve when something dies but I was thinking something more like this:
"Infestation Rank 3
When an enemy takes damage from one of your diseases, it has a 30% chance of producing 3-5 Bloodworms. Bloodworms attack your enemies, healing you for the amount of damage they deal for 20 sec or until killed. This effect cannot happen more then once every 45 seconds."
This would allow it to work on bosses as well as in pvp with far more useful results and since we already have vendetta being an "on death" ability we shouldn't have another deeper in the tree.
I would put this on the beta DK boards but I don't have that key yet dang it!
Agree on that guy that sayed that if we want to tank anything past heroics (come on dude , do you really think that well tank KelThuzan 10-man with theese talents ? Nope. ) we WILL need a tree that is solid for tanking . Yes , Frost has already many mitigantion potencial talents . Yes , that unholy-ebon-plaguebringer-o-death will tank my 5man heroic if he has brains and gear for it . But Kel'Thuzie par expamle ? No, I think his frotbolt would shatter my ANS :P .
Solution ? - well , make frost a bit more of a durability tree , with more frost-effect controlabillity and burst potential. For blood , well make them Deaths masters of arms , continue the way of high parry and Will of teh necropolis needs to be buffed up to 50% of health , oh and nice self healing capability woudl be more than interesting for a tank ! Immagine : 3 dps , 1 BDK tank and 1 restokin (example for an off-healer) . Coul work!
And unholy - make it the ultimate anti-caster build in the game ! Yes DKs are supposed to be utlimate anti-casters but give unholy the pinacle of it ;) . And some more of pyhsical mitigation wouldnt go astray ! (20 sec and 1 frostrune-only on Bone Armor? Souns nice with me )
Back on topic :
Frost strike - ít NEEDs to be instant . For **** mercy , a heroic strike that costs a whole RUNE ? I'd rather wait that 1 sec for another Icy touch . As an instant attack that gets the bonuses of thundra staleker , FRW and glacial rot it deals some Mortal strik-ish damage, at the cost of a rune ? Fair trade . And for my comment on "frozen" effect on a boss , I wrote somewhere else that FS ot FRW should have an update talent that gives them a disease (lets call it Chillflue) . So this chillflue woudl "only" cause the target to be "frozen" (like the new frost mage talent) . Hence - it boosts all DK dps (its a disease) , boost frost DK signiicantly(its "frozen") and gives mages another raid-esque shatter-proccer.
My 3 cents.
--Sithril
My Death strike would look like as it is now but if ur target is below 20% hp it would deal 100% or 150% (i will let balancing the numbers to Blizz) weapon dmg (so it would also scale with gear)
And it would be an executelike ablility and stil diferent from execute/hammer of wrath.
@ above
well posted. I read in the US Boards something like you have a Frost Mage etc.. i don't want to be forced to have a frost mage to allow me to work as frost specc.
On a side note:
I'm a big fan of your concept:
Frost - migation, physical damage tanker
Unholy - God of Aoe and anti magic
Blood - big dps with high parry values
But someone who really wants to be a viable tank should be able to do so by speccing Frost in my opinion
-Saitoz-
I actually posted an idea for a baseline DK move that I thought might help out with all specs of tanks.
Was called Glacial Winds, went something like this.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8429985279&postId=84292370558&sid=1#0
It's me or the talent "Mark of Blood" is now instant and the 3 min cooldown was removed ?
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/deathknight/talents2.html
Do you think they will change Vendetta back to 6% then as well Leiah?
Great stuff and amazing vids but is DW viable as of right now? (i know that most dk attacks are weapon % based) but could you possibly make a short vid for DW any spec?
I enjoy the company of men, as opposed to women.
I think, Death Strike should become a Strike to Kill... only useable under 20% Health of the Mob an completly converting RunePower to do more Damage more Rune Power you have. Like Execute from Warrior.
The entire instant attack system needs to be redesigned, as it stands Blood Strike is an inferior Obliterate, Degenerate is an inferior Plague Strike, Icy Touch and Frost Strike will be competing for Frost Runes and Frozen bonus damage and Death Strike is worthless.
Either instant attacks need to be consolidated, differentiated or moved to Runic Power.
On paper, Deathchill and Frost Strike looks over powered, I don't believe 100% + weapon damage instant attacks were intended to be a 1 Rune cost when compared to Obliterate and Plague Strike. Either Frost Strike needs to be reduced to a 60% weapon damage instant attack for 1 Rune cost, on par with Blood Strike, Death Strike and Degenerate or 2 Rune cost (1 Frost, 1 Unholy).
If both Frost Strike and Icy Touch share Frozen bonus damage, then you'll always use Frost Strike over Icy Touch because the damage coefficient will scale better for a weapon based attack. Since Frost specs are Frost rune starved, and Frozen Strike and Icy Touch are competing with each other for Frozen bonus damage, it makes sense to change Icy Touch from 1 Frost rune to 20 Runic Power if its main purpose is to debuff the opponent. This creates greater synergy between your abilities, because now Frost Strike can feed off of the Freeze procs from your utility abilities and your utility abilities can get Frozen damage bonuses when your Runes are on cool down.
Also, I'd like to see Frost Strike become trainable with a -50%, 10sec movement debuff ala Frostbrand so non-Frost specs can use a PVP snare. Either that or Chillblains needs another 2 ranks to make Icy Touch and Mind Freeze better snares , and Chillblains needs to be dropped to Tier 1 of the Frost tree.
It's ridiculous that Shamans have better movement debuffs than Death Knights, when Shamans have Ghost Wolf and Spectral Transformation to close distance and break snares. Death Knights need movement debuffs, so either movement debuffs should come standard on Frost abilities or movement debuffs should come talented on Frost abilities lower on the Frost tree. I'd also like to see more abilities under Frostbite for more freeze procs and Glacial Rot changed to increasing the damage of your abilities to frozen targets instead of diseased targets to give the Frost tree more synergy.
Blood Strike needs to be differentiated from Obliterate, instead of adding damage based on diseases it should just add health based on % of damage to give all talent specs Rune based regeneration. I'd also like to see Rune Tap and Improved Rune Tap come off the Blood talent tree, and then turn Rune Tap into a trainable ability that consumes Runic Power, because Death Knights don't have enough generic Runic Power dumps and no one in their right mind is going to put 3 talent points into Improved Rune Tap.
The suggestion for Blood Strike obsoletes Death Strike altogether, so I propose Death Strike and Degenerate be consolidated into one skill and become a -50%, 10sec healing debuff. Honestly, they just need to institute Unholy Embrace for the turn HoTs into DoTs and Absorption into Damage ability, because Degenerate is sub-par against half the healing classes.
@ Breathweapon
I'm not really sure how to respond to your comment without sounding to harsh.
But I'm really tired of reading all this stuff about people leveling to 60 or not even having set a foot in the beta.
First:
"On paper, Deathchill and Frost Strike looks over powered, I don't believe 100% + weapon damage instant attacks were intended to be a 1 Rune cost when compared to Obliterate and Plague Strike. Either Frost Strike needs to be reduced to a 60% weapon damage instant attack for 1 Rune cost, on par with Blood Strike, Death Strike and Degenerate or 2 Rune cost (1 Frost, 1 Unholy)."
The thing is that Obliterate does FAR more damage and allways will do when you gear in the right way.
For the actual beta Obliterate eats ALL diseases and stackwise on the target. Do the math or look at leiahs pics. It does quite some good damage.
Once you are armor penetration capped Frost Strike looses the whole benefit of ignoring armor and doing frost damage.
Aside from that 2 rune costs let you sit rune starved nearly all of the time.
If you had ever specced that tree you would know how fucked up Frost is atm with the whole frozen theme.
Frost Strike is a good ability of course but its a 41 Talent. Compare it to other 41 talents like Heart Strike, Frost Elemental or Crusader Strike and you see there is nothing bad about it.
The combination with Death Chill seems to me to be another version of Pom Am Pyro shizzl from my POV.
Maybe making Frost Strike more like devastate (hit with both weapons) would suit this more in favoring DW and cutting a little bit on the burst by maybe adding a 3 second CD so that you can't spam it with Death Chill. But it needs to stay 100% 1 Rune and pure Frostdamage.
Its a good tank tool allowing me to DW and i don't need another low damage instant attack that won't let me hold aggro.
Mangle is better than Claw there no big deal about it.
"The entire instant attack system needs to be redesigned, as it stands Blood Strike is an inferior Obliterate, Degenerate is an inferior Plague Strike, Icy Touch and Frost Strike will be competing for Frost Runes and Frozen bonus damage and Death Strike is worthless."
Blood Strike is FAR better when talented and specced for Blood with rune mastery and Sudden Doom. It's rune / damage ratio is far better than Obliterate while not eating your diseases. Obliterate is for Unholy specced Dks speccing Annihiliation where it really shines.
Degenerate is a HoT Remover for Pvp and a disease giver for tank specced Dk or unholy Dks spamming Obliterate (see above)
You won't use Plague Strikes twice in a circle as the dot does good damage when it ticks.
Icy Touch and Frost Strike really share some problem. It's the whole fucked up freeze shit going on in this tree that does not work once you hit raid bosses with it and works against you class with freezes breaking on diseases and mobs loosing aggro once you move (yes i know you can bloodboil them but that should not be its main use).
Aside from that i guess we have to say bye to IT being a good dps tool like it was in Alpha. It seems to be meant as a debuff once every second cycle. The only thing really not fitting in is Killing Machine. Once i got decent Northrend gear I started to crit like crazy.
As for Death Strike. Yeah this skill sucks but i'll wait for the change
I'm still hoping someone at Blizzard really moves the Frost tree more towards tanking as this whole every specc can tank thing really won't work well since tanking is about migation and the Dk really misses this in his skills and talents when compared to the three other tank specced classes.
-Saitoz-
Buff/Change Rune Tap, and especially Improved Rune Tap.
14,5% max health for 4 talents that eat away Blood Runes? No thanks.
"it makes sense to change Icy Touch from 1 Frost rune to 20 Runic Power"
Correct me if i am wrong but that would mean on low levels i simply cant use up my 2 frost runes except if i go frost...?
"Once you are armor penetration capped Frost Strike looses the whole benefit of ignoring armor and doing frost damage." -Saitoz
Saitoz, I'm not sure what you mean here but I daresay it's not accurate. There is not enough armor penetration available to come anywhere close to reducing all enemy targets to zero armor.
That warrior with 10,000 armor is reducing your physical damage by almost 50% at level 70. Convert the attack to Frost and you're doing 100% damage, which is effectively double.
Excellent comment guys. And yes Saitoz, I share a lot of your concerns. I've already brought up most of them internally, if not on the alpha/beta forums, to my blizz contact. ;)
@ briahn
perhaps i should really add that I'm looking from a PvE perspective, since from my experience in Pvp speccs like Death Chill + FrostStrike spam are comparable to Arcane Power Pom Pyro Speccs or a combat rogue pressing Adrenalin Rush.
They are good in BGs but i doubt you ll see a Frostknight in serious Arena games since it offers nothing compared to Heart Strike and the tremendous self healing abilities of a Bloodknight or the whole lot of utility spells and talents owned by a Plagueknight.
So I looked at Frost from a PvE perspective and most melee classes in Sunwell are currently armorpenetration-capped since it's the best scaling stat endgame.
Once you reach this level the Frost Strike looses its main benefits from a dps perspective.
@ leiah
glad to hear, i hope something comes up in the next time. But for now i'll wait till the patch. Maybe I'll create a little video showing the speccs and giving a little introduction to this class..
You will have to bear with my crude english :D
I have played around quite a bit with a triple specc dwing with Necrosis, Vendetta, and Killing Machine as the core talents which i found to be quite amusing.
I'm really puzzled where this whole DW thing is going to. From actual itemization DW seems to favor tanking since all actual tank weapons are onehand but who knows what will come up in Northrend (*hint* ashbringer with DEF Stats *hint* :D )
-Saitoz-
I dont think as DK we can dream about Ashbringer maybe the corrupted version xD
But our weapon is Frostmourne =)
Of course Frost Strike isn't as good as Obliterate when Obliterate has diseases up, but in PvP situations where you don't have the time to cast diseases, Deathchill -> Frost Strike is front loading a lot of damage thru' an opponent's armor for a little cost. Frost Strike seems to be in between Bloodstrike and Obliterate, too good for 1 Rune instant attack and not good enough for 2 Rune instant attack.
I'll wait until Frost Strike becomes an instant attack until I pass judgment, but until then it's something I want to test before I write it off.
Yeah, Bloodstrike is reasonable when you have it talented and you have diseases stacked and you haven't Obliterated those diseases away, but the dissynergy between Bloostrike and Obliterate is profound for Blood and Unholy specs. If you rotate Icy Touch, Degenerate, Plague Strike and Obliterate then Blood Strike doesn't have a use, and if you rotate Degenerate, Plague Strike, Deatchill, Frost Strike and Obliterate you're still not using Blood Strike unless you proc a Blood Rune. So Blood Strike doesn't have a point unless your substituting it for Plagued Strike when it's disease is A) stacked and B) not consumed by Obliterate.
If Blood Strike is sub-optimal in DPS rotations compared to Obliterate, I'd rather Blood Strike have a non disease based ability. It is/will be the same for Degeneration and Death Strike depending on what abilities Death Strike gains. Perhaps a bleed effect for Blood Strike and a leach effect for Death Strike, so Blood Strike is a non disease source of DPS and Death Strike is an "oh shit" instant attack.
Summary, there needs to be 1 Rune or 2 Rune instant attacks that can break the "optimized" DPS rotations in favor of utility abilities and not secondary DPS instant attacks that you manage to "fit in" when it's convenient.
I'm indifferent towards Degenerate, but it feels as tho' DKs are being denied a reasonable Mortal Strike effect with Degenerate replacing Unholy Embrace.
Agreed on Frost tree, it's one part ice tree and one part protection tree, so the PvP and the PvE roles of the tree are conflicting with each other. Perhaps the damage mitigation abilities of the Blood and Frost trees should be moved to the bottom of the trees so you can just cross spec for all the damage mitigation abilities, and the offensive Blood talents and the "Mage" Frost talents can be moved up the tree. At least Blade Barrier could replace Improved Rune Tap in the Blood tree or Bone Armor and Unholy Rune Mastery could trade places in the Unholy tree.
I don't have a problem with the damage mitigation abilities in two separate trees, it's just how deep the damage mitigation abilities are that bothers me.
@Immolthar
The idea was to untalent Frost Strike and turn it into a trainable skill that consumes Frost runes.
I agree not having a ranged Frost rune dump for Unholy specs is kind of irritating tho'.
@ Saizo, oh you're talking PvE, and not PvP, I'm not certain that's a fair criteria considering Frost spec appears to be for PvP.
@ breath
i doubt you'll see a Frost specced Dk in a lot of Arena Games besides perhaps 2n2 with a Frost Mage.
And for me Frost Strike is a good source of aggro for one frost rune.
I guess you're right. We have to see the patch and do some test.
As I said I would be happy if Frost moved more towards DW and Frost Strike got something like Devastate like hitting with both weapons but skipping the + damage it has atm.
Would that sound fair to you?
-Saitoz-
Sounds reasonable, altho' I'd have to see how DW affects instant strikes before I'd be agreeable. I have serious doubts about Blizzard being able to normalize DPS between 2H and DW tho', as it stands I'd rather be able to equip a Shield than DW.
Granted Death Knights are ASStastic in PvP ATM, but I don't see Blood spec or Unholy spec being viable either. We need mobility, we need snares, we need a cleanse and we need anti-Healer abilities to be competitive.
Chillblains needs 5 ranks and should affect all Frost abilities and spells, Anti-Magic Shield needs to remove magic based debuffs or Icebound Fortituted needs to make us immune to Freezes and Chills, and we need more than Degenerate for anti-Healer abilities.
An interesting proposal I've seen is to have an Unholy based curse that converts all healing spells into damage spells on the target and then counts the target as a friendly target for healing spells, so you can turn your healers into DPSers for X seconds.
We just need another mobility skill, I'd take a Charge with a 30 second cool down for a Blood rune or a Sprint with a 2 minute cool down for an Unholy rune etc.
PvP needs a lot of band aids, because Death Knights just aren't viable.
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