Spooncraft

Howdy everybody, here we have the Blue posts and class discussions for the weekend and today. Druids, Warriors, Death Knights, and Hunters all got a little something their way.

Druids

As far as the previous poster who likes the Feral as the tank / dps hybrid, I don’t think anything we’re doing will really hurt that. You may be 5-10 talent points behind a tank-focused Feral or a dps-focused Feral but if you liked OTing the bear boss in ZA and then dps’ing on the eagle boss, you should still be great at doing that. The difference is the bear who does spend those talents on threat, mitigation and oh snap abilities instead of +Shred can actually be a raid’s primary main tank. (src)

Hunter

• Distracting Shot - It will now be a “Mocking Blow”-esque taunt (so it will taunt the mob onto the Hunter for 6 sec). This will allow you to “peel” monsters to you (and thus to a trap) a lot easier than it is now. (src)
• Freezing Trap - It will no longer break on damage 100% of the time. It will still break on damage, but on x amount. So if the mob has a DoT on them, or the mob gets cleaved while in Freezing Trap, it won’t just immediately break. Because of this, we’re canning Bear Trap (since Freezing Trap will accomplish what Bear Trap was intended for, plus you guys have enough keybinds as it is). Note that we don’t intend Freezing Trap to be a stun, so the tuning on how much damage will break it will be important. (src)
• Camouflage - We’ll be introducing this new spell at level 80. It will give you limited stealth capabilities. A bonus with it is that you can lay your traps while Camouflaged and it won’t break the stealth, allowing you to setup your traps before a pull if desired. (src)
• Trap Mastery - This talent will be a 1-point talent now, we’ve condensed a lot of the trap talents in the Survival tree. It will do stuff like increase damage of Immolate, root the dispeller of your Freezing Trap in ice, increase the number of snakes from your snake trap, etc. (src)

Future Traps Improvements
We definitely do want to make traps more usable. We’ve discussed a lot of different options over the years (including throwing your traps, having them turn into shots etc.) but in the end we feel we’d like to retain the unique gameplay of traps, and improve them without re-designing what traps really are. (src)

Warrior
If you have run many of the Northrend dungeons, you’ll see that there aren’t many of the Shattered Halls style 6-7 mob pulls. And if we add those, they need to be non-elite or otherwise weak enough that they can be AE’d or zerged down without the expectation that the tank has to hold them all for a long time.

Players sometimes ask for Thunder Clap (or fill in your favorite ability) to affect more targets, and in Thunder Clap’s case, that is probably a good thing. But really what we’d like to see is these abilities hold the number of targets they are supposed to hold effectively. It’s unfortunately typical that when a tank is tanking say 3 targets that the first one dies quickly, the second one is tanked effectively, but somewhere near the end of the fight, the third one breaks free. If Thunder Clap affects 5 or 6 targets, those targets need to be effectively tanked by Thunder Clap (and the rest of the warrior’s rotation).

Likewise, we don’t want to reduce the cooldown of Thunder Clap to zero. That means a warrior could just that ability to tank and no other. We’d rather see a Thunder Clap, followed by Cleaves, Mortal Strikes, Shield Slams and whatever else, and then another Thunder Clap. To make that work however, the threat of Thunder Clap needs to be high enough to survive the cooldown and I don’t think that is happening enough now. (src)

Arms / Overpower
I can’t recall if I mentioned this, but one thing that comes up a lot is letting Arms get better use out of Overpower in PvE. No promises, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see something like this. (src)

Death Knight

Bloodworms
We’d like to solve the aggro issues first and then evaluate the spell.

We don’t want to link it to Death Strike again, because then Death Strike is either weak in the absence of Bloodworms, or OP with it.

With the big death knight revamp, the class plays a lot smoother overall. But some players have a higher tolerance for random events and miss a little of the chaos of the older DK. Bloodworms is the kind of talent that’s for players who like to be surprised. (But I don’t mean surprised because the maggots go and pull the boss before you’re ready. (src)

Armor Sets & Retroactive Itemization
There is no plan to retroactively itemize Death Knights. The Death Knight specific armor won’t start popping up until you reach the icy peaks of Northrend.

Adding the ability for them to use items that currently exist isn’t quite the same as retroactively itemizing Death Knight sets. There is no plan, for example, to create a Death Knight set from level 60-70 dungeons such as Valor or Bold, and no plan to create Death Knight class specific raid sets.

In other words, don’t hold your breathe for your two man Onyxia kill to put out a Death Knight tier 2 helm. Hope that clarifies things a little better. (src)

Death Knight Sigils
We have been largely holding off on implementing Sigils for the Death Knight until their abilities and talents are completely finalized. Don’t worry though, we will make sure there’s a Sigil for all play styles. (src)

Night of the Dead and Multiple Ghouls
The intent of Night of the Dead is to allow deep Unholy Death Knights the ability to summon their ghoul far more reliably than other specs. However you are only intended to have one ghoul raised at a time, multiple ghouls is a bug. (src)

Unholy Aura & Unholy Presence
The only relation they have to presences is that the presence is sometimes redundant with the aura for the death knight himself. Unholy Aura and Unholy Presence both grant a 15% movement speed and these do not stack (with each other or anything). However, a DK in Blood or Frost Presence can still benefit from the movement speed if she has Unholy Aura. A potentially bigger benefit is that 24 other people in your raid also move faster all the time. (src)

Chains of Ice
Chains of Ice is a physical slow with no diminishing returns that cannot be dispelled. Enjoy.

Because the debuff starts at 0% movement speed for a second, it feels a little like a root, but mechanically it is not a root nor a freeze. Apologies to the Frost mages, but I’m not sure it’s a great idea to have so much synergy between two classes. That was the sort of thing that lead to warlocks and shadow priests cackling over +Shadow buffs and pushing mages out of raids.

Hand of Freedom will effect it just like other movement impairing effects, as will pvp trinkets etc. The key difference is that it is no longer considered a Magic effect and thus is not vulnerable to Dispel Magic, Cleanse and the likes. (src)

Runes cooldown pushed back by melee hits
This is obviously not intended functionality, the only thing that should have any effect on your runes cooling down is the passage of talent and the triggering of assorted talents and abilities. If anyone can give more specific details of when this is happening or prove that it is in fact happening we will get it fixed asap. (src)

Blood vs Frost
Icy Touch — may very well need to do more damage. It was reduced back in the day when death knights kept saying “Why would I ever use Death Coil?”

Obliterate — underwent a similar phenomenon. Every DK rotation was built around Obliterate spam. It needs to do more damage than something like Heart Strike.

Hungering Cold — after experimenting with the scaling costs for a long time, we think they are just awkward and confusing. DRW will probably stay as “uses all your RP” but Hungering Cold and Unholy Blight will probably be a discrete cost of something like 60 RP.

Blood of the North — the idea of this talent is that you could Blood Strike twice, and then be able to Obliterate or Howling Blast twice the next time around (the aptly named FUFUFU rotation). Walk me through why Plague Strikes turning into Death Runes is helpful — it’s pretty hard to ever skip over spending an Unholy Rune, yes?

Similarly, we would love to work a Death Rune ability into Unholy but can’t figure out how to make it work. Unholy doesn’t really need more Unholy runes unless the DK wants to spam Plague / Scourge to grind down the cooldowns through Night of the Dead. A clone of Blood of the North might be helpful for the FUFUFU, but then Unholy might play a lot like Frost too.

Dancing Rune Weapon — we’ve actually known it’s overpowered for some time. We left it that way on purpose because there were still so many threads (misguided we suspect) about how weak it was. Psychology is unfortunately a reality of game testing, and we wanted to make sure people would actually use it. I’m not saying it needs to be nerfed to the ground, but it is probably doing too much damage.

Blood in general — we’re not inclined to do anything to Blood’s damage until we have some good numbers about how DKs compare to other classes. One change that is potentially coming down the pike is letting Blood Boil be a more spammable ability, and perhaps letting that replace Pestilence as a good tanking tool. It would give Blood some different spells to work in as well. (src)

Future DK Changes
We’ll try and improve RP generation of Frost.

I think Howling Blast could go down to a 10 sec cooldown. That would let you use it once a rotation with Obliterate using the other FU if you turned your two Blood Runes into Death runes. If it has no cooldown, then it might compete a lot with Obliterate.

In the next build, try spamming Blood Boil instead of Pestilence. Use Pestilence to spread diseases to set up Blood Boil.

As everyone has pointed out, Death Rune Mastery was designed to mix up the rotation of Blood and it seems to do that well. Blood of the North was designed to let you mix up Frost, but low Icy Touch damage and a long Howling Blast cooldown seem to be inhibiting that. Obliterate may be too weak now too.

The thing that changes up Unholy’s rotation more than anything is Epidemic. You should be able to skip the Icy Touch and Plague Strike the second time around and just wail away with Obliterates, Blood Strikes or the new Blood Boil. Scourge Strike itself does decent damage, but if you use it twice, then you end up with an extra Frost that you can only use for Icy Touch. But if we turned that Frost into a Death Rune for yet another Scourge Strike, then you’d lose Frost Fever (unless Scourge Strike itself applied Frost Fever too, but then you’d totally waste Icy Touch). It’s tricky. (src)

Black Ice Tooltip
Black Ice says it affects “spells” but I believe the way it is set up is just to improve Frost and Shadow damage. I’m not sure if anyone has tested that or not. Changing that tooltip could have a big effect on Frost and Unholy. (src)

Bloodworms Healing
The Bloodworms should heal you for 150% of the damage they do. If they hit for 30, they should heal you for 45. There were some bugs with the calculation until recently. (src)

Aura Icons
We turned the aura icons off. Once you get the talent, that aura will be up all the time so we thought it was annoying to have the icon always there reminding you. Most passive talents aren’t shown as icons. It shows up for the other players in your group, however, to remind them. (src)