My experience with Blade & Soul.

As it was recently announced, Blade & Soul will soon be upon our shores here in North America, and I can't possibly be any more excited!

Part 1:  The context

I've been an MMO player since the original Everquest was released.  I love MMOs!  I always found a lot of value with MMOs than most other purchased games, even when paying for subscriptions to play them.  Considering I've played World of Warcraft, as one example, for somewhere in the 300 days /played category, I'd say I got my moneys worth overall.

Since World of Warcraft, I've played nearly every MMO that has come out since, and I've been consistently let down.  Rather than list out every MMO I've played and my reasons for why I failed to fall in love with each one, I'd like to focus on a couple in particular.

Before I ever tried Blade & Soul, I was already poised to hate it.  I already had a big, nasty taste in my mouth from Aion (a game I had hoped would be much better).  Aion was arguably the first big name korean MMO to come to the American shores, or at least it had the best marketing campaign (sorry, Lineage 2).  This was Korea's first big chance to make a giant splash in the western MMO market.

What went wrong with Aion?

• Horrible leveling experience.
• Running out of quests and needing to grind for several levels at a time in a post-WoW western MMO market?  Huge mistake.
• Major combat & class issues:
• Ranger stabbing things with daggers and didn't even get a bow until level 16ish? Yikes.
• In PvP, if someone was even a couple levels over you, you were at a *huge* disadvantage with the way their resistance & damage reduction system worked.Your spells against them probably had a ~20% chance to do anything at all.
• The fact that critical strikes could often do less damage than a normal hit felt... stupid? I'm looking at you, stunning shot.
• The "flight" system felt really poorly done.  
• You couldn't even fly in most areas of the game, and when you could, it was extremely limited.
• Very disappointing after being marketed as a huge part of the game.
• Instances:
• Often dropped 0 loot for *anyone* in the party.  That's right, zero.
• If they did, they'd be placeholder loot (that no one wanted) from placeholder bosses). Very unrewarding!
• The very first instance you could do was around level 25 in the Abyss, and had an 8 hour cooldown..   Wait, what?
• By the time you could run it again (after getting no loot), you'd have out-leveled it by then, which leads me to...
• Instances had both minimum and maximum level requirements.  You couldn't help your friends run them if you were too high (not that you'd want to anyway).
• Never-ending consumable farm
• You ended up needing to spend more time farming consumables to pvp, than pvping itself.

There were many, many more issues with it, but needless to say it was very horribly done *for players that were accustomed to WoW at this point*.

Fast forward awhile, and Tera came out.  Tera was a really awesome game with combat that was *mostly* fun and certainly new for an MMO.  However, it feels like that was the only part of the game that was focused on.  Tera really lacked many other critical systems, such as:

• A proper end-game reward system
• Relying on just boss drops and leveling up some crafting skills are not going to be enough to keep people entertained end-game.
• The ability to progress through the story quests without absolutely requiring grouping and doing certain dungeon quests.
• An engaging story/lore.  Wait, did Tera even have a story?
• Proper optimization 
• This is still the #1 reason I don't play this game anymore
• There's no reason a player should be getting 15-25 fps on a high-end, custom-built pc with high graphics in a battleground, or even lower fps (~10) just standing around in town. This is 100% inexcusable.
• Touted as a very skill-based combat system, yet many of the abilities (stuns/etc) were highly RNG-based for the first year or two of the games life here in NA.  I.e. you try to play correctly and stun a boss right before it does a huge move, but the boss rolls a dice, and just "resists" the stun and smashes you anyway..... Cool.  At this point, we're not really much different from games were bosses are just flat out immune to stuns in the name of difficulty, are we?
• The animation-lock is a bit much for many players.  Yes, this is exactly how fighting games work:  i.e. You can't run around back and forth while shooting Hadoukens at people in Street Fighter.  You are stuck in that animation until the fireball is thrown.  However, I don't think many players expected it to be as restrictive as it was, especially for the basic attacks.
• Fun fact:
• I made a suggestion post on the /r/tera subreddit around 2 years ago, giving them a laundry list of things they should try doing to keep the game from dying, as they were bleeding subscriptions hard back then.
• Much to my surprise, they actually turned around and implemented most of them almost verbatim in the following spring.  Either it was coincidence, or they agreed with me.

Part 2: First Impressions

December 2012 eventually rolled around, and I got my hands on a Blade & Soul account.  One of my Korean coworkers at Blizzard let me play his account.  I had heard it was doing very well in Korea, and wanted to try it out.  He was also curious what my opinion would be, since at this point, I had become very jaded with basically all new MMOs.

I was ready to hate the game.  My last NCSoft game was Aion, and I was so ready to be unimpressed.

Boy, was I wrong.

First thing I noticed was the character creation process.

It was overwhelming at first.  I took one look through all of the possible sliders and combinations, and felt it was too much.  I thought that even if I did create a character that looked perfect, there'd be no way I'd be able to repeat the process. There are just too many options to screenshot and catalog for later use, as was necessary with games like Aion & Tera.

Much to my surprise, I found out that you can save character templates using the button at the bottom.

These get saved under your Windows user\pictures\bns\CharacterCustomize\ folder as a simple .jpg with embedded template metadata in the file.  You can email these to a buddy, he can drop it in the same folder, open up the utility in-game and see your template right there.  No need for dozens of slider screenshots.  You can rename the .jpg template files to be whatever you want, for context later, too.  It's simply brilliant.

Part 3 - The Intro

Ok, this is critically important.  Games need to engage the player in the first few minutes of gameplay, or many of the will quickly lose interest and not bother.  This is especially true for players that aren't coming in with a valued recommendation (such as from a friend).  Industry research has shown that players are nearly 10x more likely to stick with the initial learning curve of an online multiplayer game if a friend is there to guide or help them along.

Blade & Soul starts off showing your character getting rescued out of the water by an unknown person who seems to recognize your clan symbol on your uniform.  This is where the game first really hit me that it was something special.  I was playing this in a foreign language that I do not read or speak, and could understand exactly what was happening.  The animations and expressions alone sell the characters and the action.  I also liked the credits being shown, blended into the background like an old kung fu flick.  Very stylish.

The game then jumps the player through a few, very brief intro tasks to get them accustomed to talking to npcs, equipping gear, and completing quests.  They also teach the player the basics of combat, how to pick yourself up after being defeated, and using health potions.  After that, the game engages the player by thrusting them directly into the main plot within minutes of creating their character.

It turns out that one of your fellow disciples was a traitor, and led the main antagonist right to your doorstep to steal your clans power.  Opening cut scenes like this for a new player are far more powerful than, say, an "isle of dawn" experience.  It was immediately clear to me at this point that the production levels on this game were top-shelf.

Part 4: The Combat

Since killing stuff is what people do 80% of the time while playing MMOs, this is a very important topic and I'd like to spend some extra time on it.

You see, in games like WoW, Aion, and DAOC, the combat was essentially modeled after Everquest. Everquest, in turn, was just a graphical MUD (Multi-user dimension).  In those games, things are given a swing timer (how often they can attack), and then there's a dice roll that determines hit or miss.  Then, there are further dice rolls if a hit is landed to determine what kind of hit (crit, etc).  To make the combat more interesting than that, abilties are added for players to use in between these "auto-attacks".  The major downside of this system is, no matter how reactive you are, there's just no mitigating these attacks, since whether you get hit or not has traditionally been decided via dice rolls (and then modified through the gear your character wears).  

A crude example would be two hunters in World of Warcraft fighting each other.  Once they are in range of each other, it's more or less a race of who pushes their big, damaging abilities in order the fastest. Then, it's which of them get the best dice-roll modifiers for crits and other effects.  It's like two warships pulling up next to each other in the ocean, and just unloading on each other until the other one sinks.  There's a lot of damage buttons to push, but not really so much on avoiding damage.

This was a fair system when a large portion (or even a majority) of players were on a dial-up connection.  Real-time combat was never a possibility in those days.  By the time you saw someone take a swing at you, the dice roll had already happened and you already did or didn't take the damage. Strafing around a target to avoid its attacks was always a futile endeavor.

And then you have special abilities that are usually tied a universal cooldown, usually called the global cooldown, or "GCD" for short.  This prevents a player from, resources allowing, spamming a single instant ability as fast as they can.  It also prevents players from using multiple different abilities at the same time.  Of course, there are often exceptions to this rule.  These abilities are usually referred to as being "off the GCD".

Blade & Soul approaches combat very differently.  The main reason for this is that the GCD is directly proportional to your ping to the server.  That's right!  The only bottleneck for how fast you use your abilities is how good you are at cycling through abilities that use or spend your resource, and your latency.  The GCD still exists even in this diminished fashion to gate players from using multiple abilities at once, though.

Put another way:  In Blade & Soul, your latency is your "haste" stat.  If you have a 10 ping to the server, you will be able to use far more abilities - and thus deal far more damage - than someone with a 200 or higher ping.

Here's an example of how fast an Assassin can attack a target with a very low ping to the server.

Holy Moly. 

Keep in mind this game was designed originally for Korean players, many of whom have the fastest connections in the world.

Part 4 Continued:  What about targeting?

There are basically two types of abilities in the game. Some that do not require a target, and some that do.  For the abilities that require targets, this game is *not* a tab-target game.  Instead, it auto-targets the closest thing in front of your character's crosshairs.

Here's an example of the auto-targeting system:

This game plays like a fighting-game-mmo-hybrid, as the flow of combat is more reactive than rotational.  Similar to Tera, the NPCs have animation-based "tells" intertwined with their attacks to give you visual cues on when to reactive.

However, tells are only as useful as the tools you're given to deal with them, and this is where the game's combat truly shines.  Each class has *multiple* ways to deal with or mitigate incoming damage, but I'll focus on just one class for now. 

The Blademaster class has a "block" move that mitigates *nearly* any frontal attack in the game.

Example:  

When you block, you take 0 damage from the attack, and it makes one of your big attacks instant so you can retaliate swiftly.  The block only lasts a few seconds after pushing it, so to keep blocking, you have to keep pushing the button.  In this regard, it's similar to the block mechanic in Tera (Lancer, Warrior, Zerker).  However, it doesn't stop there.

If you spend some skill points (more on this later) into block because you find yourself tanking a lot, you can actually change the way the block works.  For example:  Speccing into block one way makes it so that if you time your blocks perfectly (within 0.5 seconds of being hit), then you will parry and stun the attacker instead.  You will also hear a different sound effect for a parry, reinforcing the fact that you've made a skillful block timing.

Here's what that looks and sounds like:

In addition to blocks, there are other abilities that grant temporary invulnerability.  Backdashing (pressing the "S" key twice in rapid succession for you WASD users), side-dodging and other abilities that are too many to list here fall into this category.

Or you can choose to go on the offensive, and CC the monster instead.  I know what you're thinking:  "But that doesn't work on bosses, right?"  Wrong!  Here's how you can get away with CCing bosses.

Part 4 Continued:  Keeping class kits meaningful

Traditionally, MMOs usually end up making bosses immune to CC to keep the encounter "difficult". Unfortunately, removing this type of damage mitigation only serves to reinforce the "holy trinity" style of gameplay, where you need dedicated tanks and healers.  Thankfully, Blade & Soul gets away from this paradigm, and allow class kits to still be fully utilized in any encounter.

Here's the jist of it:  Bosses can be CC'd if they're hit by two CCs of the same type within a 2-second window.  When the first CC is used, all other players near it get an audio and visual cue to clue them in, just in case coordination wasn't being used before hand.  If another CC of the same type lands while these cues are active, the boss gets CC'd.  Here's an example of two players working together to knock down a boss:

This actually becomes a critical strategy when tackling difficult encounters, as CC'd bosses can then be carried by certain classes to allow the party to deal damage without retaliation for several seconds.

Classes sometimes can spec into have two different CCs of the same type, allowing them to CC bosses themselves without needing to coordinate it with party members.  Destroyers and Blade Dancers fill this role very well, both of which can hold up the target for several seconds there after, further CCing the boss.  It's a refreshing twist to simply seeing "IMMUNE" when trying to stun bosses after several years.

Part 4 Continued:  The Skill System

I'll try to keep this brief.  The skill system is awesome.  The closest thing I can compare it to is a combination of Diablo 3's skill rune system, along with WoW's skill glyphs.

Essentially, every ability you get in the game has an individual skill tree, and you get to modify their behavior, sometimes radically.  In Diablo 3, the limitation was that you could only pick skill rune (and thus only 1 modification) per skill.  In this game, you can pick multiple modifications for the same skill, though some are mutually exclusive. 

With this system, there's no need for "specs" like in World of Warcraft.  You simply keep presets of skill point combinations to tailor to your current play-style.  This also has the great advantage of letting the game designers balance different versions of the same skill to be better in PvE or PvP. This way, you don't end up with two similar skills on your hot bars that do similar yet different things. Players are given the power to tailor how their skills behave and work together based on their own likings.

Additionally:

• Players are allowed to change their skill points out of combat as often as they want at no cost.
• If players aren't sure how to spend their points, the game has "recommended" builds to steer them in the right direction for each class.  One for dungeons, one for leveling, and one for pvp.
• Players can purchase additional preset combinations from the store, allowing them to have up to 5 (i think?) preset combinations of skill points that they can switch between out of combat. Very, very handy.

Here's an example of the skill tree for one of the Blade Master's abilities:  Spin Slash

On the left, is the base ability, and on the right, I've chosen to put points into some points on one of the paths.

Part 4 Continued: Putting it all together!

Here's an example of what it all looks like when it comes together:

At this point, there are many, many more systems I could touch on that show the same incredible level of polish.  I hate to leave this as a minor footnote, but I found the leveling experience to be insanely fun.  The vistas are gorgeous, the story engaging, and I was very pleasantly surprised that I could level my way to max level in an NCSoft game without being required to group for *anything*. This, after Aion, was perhaps the most surprising.

If this blog entry generates enough interest (or enough questions), I will gladly continue this series.

Until then, I'll leave you with some of my favorite screenshots from the game, as well as another video from Steparu showing off some awesome gameplay of the Destroyer.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

Anyone else enjoy this type of music?

I certainly do.

Enjoy. =]

Q&A around the forums:

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

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:

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:

Enjoy.

Deathknights in PvP:

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...

Er, even better: :)





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

Early PvP spec(ulation) for talent build:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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

Current DK wishlist:

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?

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:

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:

Hunter Explosive Shot Feedback:

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.