The Daily Death Knight: Ch-ch-changes

No. The Daily Spoon isn’t going away, I like that title too much. There is so much going on with Death Knights on a regular basis that sometimes it can be a little hard to follow and categorize since a lot of the times aspects to all three different talent trees, PVP, raiding, etc are changed so frequently. It also helps I am rolling a Death Knight as my true blue main as soon as they go live and about the only thing that would dethrone me from that class would be Brewmasters (but that’s another expansion /wink)

Fps issues with the Anti magic zone – We can fix the fps problem without having to redo the graphic. I suspect the lower detailed versions for a lot of these spells haven’t even been done yet. (src)

Time for a new video card.

Plague Strike & Lifebloom – To whichever forum or site was asking about this, Plague Strike *removes* a hot instead of *dispelling* it. In other words, Lifebloom (the whole stack) just goes away and doesn’t bloom. Ah, the challenge of writing tooltips. (src)

AHAHAHAHA! Yes! So I won’t be cheesed to all shit by a druid anymore with 50 billion hots! Eat me Yogi! (I’m just kidding I have a lot of love for druids, just hate facing them in the arena)

Tanking talent changes – part 3

Thunderclap and Icy Touch don’t stack, at least considering the melee portions. That’s part of the raid consolidation pass I have referenced a few times.

If Frigid Dreadplate was changed to something like -AP when you hit a DK, then it could act like Demo Shout. It would work on bosses but wouldn’t stack with Demo Shout.

Some other classes might be sad when they find their awesome raid buff no longer stacks with someone else’s raid buff. Nobody has played a DK for years at this point so anything that feels like a hit to “you MUST bring a death knight” stings, but probably less than if a shaman or paladin starts hearing it about their class.

Say we gave DKs a talent that allowed Icy Talons to apply to the whole raid, but it didn’t stack with WF. The first reaction is typically, well that sucks because EVERY raid brings an Enhancement shaman, and that’s true today. But at some point if there are enough classes who offer +haste, then the haste buff is mandatory, but WF is not. What if all the +AP buffs didn’t stack? What if all of the +spell damage buffs didn’t stack? That’s the kind of thing we’re looking at. (src)

Diseases and Rotations

We talked about Scourge Strike refreshing diseases, but it leads to some weird rotations because you have a spare Frost Rune lying around. There is no point doing Icy Touch since the disease is already on, but you don’t have an extra Unholy for a second Obliterate because you used the first one on Scourge.

Scourge -> Blood -> Blood -> Obliterate -> Icy Touch?

Unholy has a reasonably interesting rotation with Epidemic, which extends disease length, and Annihilation. First rotation is your standard: Icy Touch -> Scourge -> Blood -> Blood -> Obliterate.

But next round the diseases are still there and you can: Blood -> Blood -> Obliterate -> Obliterate. Even without Annihilation, you can double Death Strike. (src)

A rotation by the way (I have gotten this question so I figure now is a good time to answer) is the series and pattern in which you cast your spells or abilities regularly. Rogues may have a rotation that looks like cheap shot > sinister strike > sinister strike > kidney shot > sinister strike > target dead? something like that anyway. With runes TYPICALLY being on a 10 second cooldown each, you’re looking at some pretty complicated stuff with working moves into a good rotation and finding the best way to act and react against your target.

Scourge Strike might get an extra debuff

Sorry for any typos. The only difference between Plague Strike and Scourge Strike is that the latter hits for Shadow damage, greatly increasing its amount of damage. If you spec Scourge Strike, pull Plague Strike off your bar just like a warrior with Devastate will do to Sunder Armor.

We might still give Scourge Strike some kind of extra debuff, but it really doesn’t need it to be a strong return on one talent point.

Heart Strike doesn’t need it either, but we got excited about the haste prevention debuff. It was suggested by an encounter designer, precisely because he knew it would work on a lot of bosses. You can pull Blood Strike off your bar if you get Heart Strike.

Frost Strike is something else entirely, and not a complete replacement for Death Coil, since the latter is ranged. Only spec Frost Strike if you don’t mind managing an extra ability. (src)

That’s all fine and good but to add to the growing list of ideas and points that need to be covered, more on tanking and talent tree synergy. Adding another TANKING class is a really touchy situation, everybody can DPS yeah, but only 4 different classes can tank.

Talent Coherency and Death Knight tanking

It’s definitely a different approach than we’ve tried before.

But here’s the problem with those existing tanking trees: not many warriors or paladins want to go into those protection trees, so there are a lot of 4-player groups out there wishing they could run an instance but unable to find a tank. And even if there were a lot of prot warriors and paladins, there is a math problem because a 5-player run needs 1 tank but a 25-player run doesn’t need 5 tanks. A potential prot warrior might not see the point of taking up the shield knowing that some percentage of prot tanks will have to give up that role in order to get into the raid.

We chose the death knight as the new class partially to address that tanking shortage. We feared that having Frost be a traditional protection tree might flood the realms with even more dps specs looking for groups.

So we thought maybe it’s time to try a different approach: Let a tank choose what kind of abilities they want access to, while still giving them access to enough tanking talents to do their job. While every tanking warrior worth her salt has Shield Slam, Imp Shield Block and Last Stand, none of them has Mortal Strike (at least not since MC and BWL), or Imp Execute or Flurry. A death knight can be a tank, yet some death knight tanks will have Howling Blast and some will have Heart Strike. A death knight tank that gets a little bored with his spec can try a completely different one and still tank. A warrior tank trying a different spec gets very limited options, like whether he wants Improved Revenge or how many points to put into Imp Defensive Stance.

The point isn’t that ALL death knights will be amazing and effortless tanks regardless of talents, but that there will have some variety in what talents the tanks do pick up. All Frost tanks will get Unbreakable Armor for the armor and parry, but maybe some will take Deathchill and some will take Killing Machine. Maybe that will convince them to tank a little longer. If not, maybe the possibility of spec’ing into Unholy and having to change up their play style will keeping them interested.

Bottom line: maybe the DK style of tanking trees will be more fun and encourage more players to try tanking out.

(I’m excluding druids because they actually do pretty well swapping from tanking to dps with one spec, but then again it is still pretty much one spec.)

Side note: clearly there are some things we can do to make tanking more fun for all classes, and those are discussions we are taking very seriously.

I hope this does not come off as dismissive or defensive. It’s a totally valid question you’re asking, so I wanted to try to give you a glimpse of our logic here. (src)