Death Knight Builds

I will be posting blue posts that have to do with Death Knights here... This page may not be as up to date as some sites such as worldofraids.com but I will do what I can to post information from forums about Death Knights.

3.0.8 PTR: Build 9386

The PTR was updated with a new build; there were a number of changes

Deathknight

Items

• Gladiator's Dreadplate Gauntlets Savage/Hateful/Deadly have a new bonus. Was: Reduces the cooldown of your Strangulate by 5 seconds. Now: Whenever you cast Chains of Ice, the Frost Rune used becomes a Death Rune when it activates.

Spells

• Howling Blast no longer has a cooldown.

Death Knight Changes in build 9138:
Blood

• Bloody Strikes - Now increases the damage by 10/20/30% and the bonus damage from diseases by 20/40/60% of your Blood Strike and Heart strike. Up from 6/12/18% damage.

• Improved Icy Touch - Now Frost Fever reduces melee and ranged attack speed by an additional 2/4/6%. Up from 1/0/0%.
• Improved Icy Talons - Now increases the melee haste instead of melee and ranged attack speed.

Death Knight Changes in build 9038
Blood

• Blade Barrier - Changed to when you have no Blood runes. (Old No runes)
• Heart Strike - Damage increased. (Now Rank 6 60% weapon damage plus 220.8, and an additional 110.4 bonus damage per disease.) (Old Rank 6 50% weapon damage plus 184.0, and an additional 92.0 bonus damage per disease. )
• Dark Command Range increased to 20yds (Old 5yds)

• Frost Presence - Armor contribution from items increased to 65%. (Old 45%)
• Frost Strike - Now cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried.
• Black Ice - Frost damage doubled (Now 6/12/18/24/30) (Old 3/6/9/12/15). It no longer affects Shadow damage.
  
• Tundra Stalker Passive Icy Touch damage lowered by 25%, expertise increase doubled. (Now 5/10/15/20/25% increase to icy touch damage, and 2/4/6/8/10 expertise) (Old 20/40/60/80/100% increase to icy touch damage, and 1/2/3/4/5 expertise.)
• Rune Strike - Runic Power cost lowered to 10, and damage increased, now only useable after an attack is dodged or parried. Can't be dodged, blocked or parried. (Damage Now - 200% weapon damage plus [200.0 * AP * 10.0 / 10000.0].) (Old 65% weapon damage, and only usable after a critical hit with an ability that causes a disease)

• Blood-Caked Blade - Chance to proc doubled. (Now 10/20/30%) (Old 5/10/15%)
• Scourge Strike Damage lowered. (Now Rank 4 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage plus 190.5, and an additional 95.25 bonus damage per disease.) (Old Rank 4 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage plus 226.8, and an additional 113.4 bonus damage per disease.)

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster

4. Re: Block   09/30/2008 11:30:45 PM PDT

Thott is correct that warrior block gains more from Strength than DK parry does. But we don't really want DK parry to reach crazy levels. A death knight with 80% parry is probably a very bad tank, not a great one. Block on the other hand always does a great job of mitigating physical damage, as long as it continues to grow. Abilities like Forceful Deflection are intended to make up for differences such as not having a gun or shield with mitigation stats on it. To actually get death knight mitigation where it needs to be, they are going to need a lot of block like a plate-wearer or a lot of armor like a druid. The second option is far more likely.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster

12. Re: DK weakest tanks?   10/02/2008 12:02:47 AM PDT

Druids mitigate a lot more damage at the moment than warriors do without any block at all. If DKs are low, improving their armor will have a similar effect. We just have to be careful, because DKs do have a lot of cooldowns, and it's possible they'll mitigate too much if we overcompensate. Now, it's possible that block might eventually surpass druid armor for mitigation, but that makes a lot of assumptions based on fights, item levels and content in general that doesn't exist yet. We have done some comparisons based on theoretical gear, but it's going to be theoretical for many months. Also remember that while avoidance is still dangerous to rely on as a tank, it is less dangerous than it used to be since bosses won't be doing back to back crushing blows. Druids were amazing tanks in BC even with crushing blows, and only started to fall down because they ran out of gear to improve their mitigation, hit the armor cap, and ran into Sunwell Radiance.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster	80. Re: Icy Touch does an insane amount of dmg no   10/01/2008 11:52:40 PM PDT
	We think what we might end up doing is shifting some of that damage from Icy Touch to Obliterate and Howling Blast. We got Frost's dps up a lot, which is good. It's also cool to see Icy Touch feel like a nuke again. We just want to back off of it a little and buff the double rune abilities.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster	43. Re: Death Knight Changes (Build 9012)   09/30/2008 08:42:39 PM PDT
	Disease damage went down a little, which will lower's Unholy's overall dps. Dancing Rune Weapon was doing a huge portion of blood's dps. We thought it was cooler to let it hit hard but be out less often. When we made these changes, Blood's dps was higher than Unholy's, which was higher than Frost's. Frost is probably still a little light as I write this so they may get more buffs.

Death Knight Changes in build 9014

• Blood Tap - Tooltip Fix : Duration changed to 20 seconds. (Old 47802d.)
• Bladed Armor - Now increases attack power by 1/2/3/4/5 for every 180 armor value. (Old 1/2/3/4/5 strength for every 400 armor)
• Abomination's Might - Range of attack power increase now 45 yds (Old 20 yds)

Frost

• Obliterate Damage lowered. (Now Rank 3 - 100% weapon damage plus 238.5, and an additional 119.25 bonus damage per disease) (Old Rank 3 - 100% weapon damage plus 252, 126 bonus damage per disease.)
• Tundra Stalker - Now gives a passive bonus increase to your Icy Touch. (20/40/60/80/100%)
• Guile of Gorefiend - No longer gives bonus to Rune Strike critical damage.
• Howling Blast - Damage increased on all ranks. (Now Rank 5 - 259 to 281) (Old Rank 5 - 192 to 208)
• Runic Focus - Description changed to : "Unlike most casters, a Death Knight's spells cause double damage on critical hits."

Unholy

• Death and Decay - Damage Increased (Now Rank 4 - 62 Damage) (Old Rank 4 - 52 Damage)
• Blood-Caked Blade - Damage increased to 25% of weapon damage. (Old 20% of weapon damage.)
• Blood Plague - Chance to remove a Heal over Time effect reduced to 25% (Old 50%)
• Reaping - Pestilence removed, Blood Strike added.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster

0. Upcoming Death Knight Changes   09/17/2008 12:22:01 AM PDT

DPS changes -- Death Coil, Frost Strike, Death and Decay damage increased. -- Strikes that scale with diseases changed so that the weapon damage, not just the flat damage, scales with the disease. -- Double rune abilities damage increased: Obliterate, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike, Death Strike. -- Unholy Blight no longer causes Blood Plague, but had its cooldown removed. -- Several attack power coefficients increased. -- Bloody Strikes and Scent of Blood swapped places. -- Bladed Armor now turns armor into Strength (which then is turned into Parry). -- Master of Ghouls' Ghoul now lasts until killed or similarly dismissed. -- Ravenous Dead no longer affects Ghoul duration, but grants your rotting little buddy 60% more of your Str and Sta. (Stam goes from 30% of yours to ~50% of yours. Strength goes from 100% to 160%.) Tanking changes -- Frost Presence now grants 10% total health in addition to its current bonuses. -- Blood Gorged, Rage of Rivendare and Tundra Stalker all grant 1/2/3/4/5 expertise. -- Veteran of the Third War increased to 6/6/6 Str / Sta / Exp to match warriors. -- Will of the Necropolis no longer grants expertise and now lowers Anti-Magic Shell cooldown. -- Pestilence has no target limit. (It still has a radius limit.) Pesilence glyph now increases area. -- Death and Decay no longer has a cower component, but a glyph can add that back. -- Frigid Dreadplate now has a 100% chance for 2/4/6% miss but only on the DK. Rewards for the selfless buffer -- Abom's Might now grants 2% Strength at all times. -- Improved Icy Talons now grants 2% haste at all times. -- Ebon Plaguebringer now grants 3% crit at all times. Runeforge changes -- Lichbane now does 2% weapon damage as Fire, and double damage to undead. -- Swordbreaking and Swordshattering add disarm duration reduction. -- Spellbreaking and Spellshattering add silence duration reduction. -- Cinderglacier reduced to 2 charges. No doubt many awesome small tweaks I am forgetting. AWESOME SMALL TWEAKS.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster

35. Re: Current List of DK Concerns:   09/16/2008 12:09:52 AM PDT

We did a big comparison recently between tanks in Naxx 10 gear with appropriate talents. I referenced this recently in the druid forums. DK armor ended up being within 3% of warrior and paladin armor. Avoidance is high, as you can probably guess, and we don't want to boost it a lot higher, because avoidance-based tanks can have problems when that hit does get through. Health was a little low, though still within 10%, and that's something we are looking into buffing. DKs also ended up with low expertise, which is a problem, because failing to land an early strike can throw everything out of whack. Other tanks can get expertise fairly deeply in their trees. We might adjust DK trees to make sure expertise is available for more than just Blood. It's hard to pin good numbers on mitigation abilities with cooldowns. If you assume that Icebound Fortitude is up 20% of the time, then it's comparable to warrior damage reduction on physical hits and AMS ends up being slightly better on magical hits. But warriors always have their damage reduction on, so it's either a wash or slightly better for warriors. Scaling is still a little hard to evaluate at this stage: warriors gain more block with strength and DKs gain more parry. We haven't finished dps tests yet. If dps is low, as many of you suppose, then threat will likely be low too because DKs don't have a lot of +threat modifiers. But that's a whole other issue. Low threat tanks aren't fun and we wouldn't want to ship one in that state. Another point worthy of note is that except for the druid (who can be uncrittable in any gear), all the plate-wearing tanks could not get to the defense "cap" without gemming for defense. If you feel like you're getting two-shotted by bosses, you might look at your defense. We don't intend for leveling instances to require a hefty investment in defense (you should be able to go with whatever quest gear you acquire) but you'll want more for the end-game dungeons and certainly for heroics and raids. The thing limiting runeforging from being really cool, in our opinion, is new art. At this stage in development, new art is pretty expensive to get, so that might be something we leave for the next patch.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster

11. Re: Master of Ghouls?   09/12/2008 11:04:32 AM PDT

This has been confusing, so we're trying to clean up the design a little bit. Raise Dead -- 2 minute duration. 5 minute cooldown. Summons a guardian (no pet bar). Ravenous Dead -- extends duration (passively) Night of the Dead -- lowers cooldown (actively) Master of Ghouls -- the summoned ghoul is a pet instead of a guardian. This means he gets a cute name, a pet bar, and there is no duration to the ability. If your ghoul is killed, you will have to wait for the cooldown before bringing him back. But your rotting little friend will stick around forever if you can keep him alive.

Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 19. Re: Regarding the removal of Obliterate from    08/22/2008 09:38:46 AM PDT Q u o t e: so heartstrike hits even less now that blood strike and its a deep talent? I hope someone can explain why this gets referenced everywhere. Rank 6 Blood Strike hits for 273 and Rank 6 Heart Strike does 355 damage per disease. It sounds like there might be an issue with Sigil of the Dark Rider not affecting Heart Strike, but that was just an oversight, and in any case should not have changed this patch. Heart Strike should always hit for more than Blood Strike. Ideally it should always hit for less than Obliterate *unless* you have every possible talent to buff Heart Strike, but those numbers may need massaging. (The logic being that Death Rune Mastery is less sexy if you don't want to do more Heart Strikes.) Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 4. Re: Howling Blast - Definitive Answer Please   08/22/2008 10:00:01 AM PDT Howling Blast costs 1F,1U. We can't control what other sites post, so please always take them with a grain of salt. (And sadly sometimes even ours is out of date.) Obliterate will often be better vs. single targets and Howling Blast will often be better for groups, especially when they are out of melee range. Howling Blast may also be better in situations where you only have Frost Fever up. Your exact talent allocation may skew one slightly ahead of the other. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 42. Re: Feedback on all specs after todays patch.   08/22/2008 10:07:07 AM PDT All DK abilities scale off of AP. Don't worry about the healing threat from Blood Aura. It's intended to be a benefit not a kiss / curse mechanic If the dps from different trees is out of line, we will continue to adjust the numbers. Many of the things being decried as nerfs were bug fixes, and some things that are being accused of buffs have always worked the way they do now. Just try out the abilities and see what works and what still needs work. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 10. Re: Change back Chinas of Ice Animation   08/22/2008 03:53:01 PM PDT It just looked dumb having someone walking along dragging that big set of crystals and chains with them. It worked better when Chains of Ice had a root. Hopefully the art in there at the moment is not the one we'll ship with. :) Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 1. Re: Honestly Merciless Combat needs a revisio   08/22/2008 10:12:56 AM PDT The funny thing is the only change to this talent (IIRC) was increasing it from 20% to 35% to bring it line with similar talents and abilities. Mobs at 20% (or even 35%) don't last long these days. I think people are just starting to discover what Frost can do, though improvements like Rime and a lower CD on Howling Blast definitely help. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 3. Re: Windfury Totem > Imp. Icy Talons?   08/22/2008 10:11:28 AM PDT Imp Icy Talons and WF Totem are alternatives to achieve the same haste benefit. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 6. Re: Double Rune Cost - Should be Double Runic   08/21/2008 05:02:58 PM PDT While Obliterate generates half as much runic power as 2 Heart Strikes, it does its damage twice as quickly too. Putting more damage per GCD is almost always beneficial. If Obliterate did more damage and runic power per GCD, it feels like there would never be a choice about using it and talents like Death Rune Mastery might start to feel underpowered. We can try increasing double rune abilities to generate 15 runic power, though I have the standard concern that runic power will be too easy to generate, especially with Death Coil and Frost Strike at 40. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 56. Re: 8820 unholy feedback   08/21/2008 10:28:08 PM PDT Not sure what is up with the Ghouls. That ability mix seems strange. They are not supposed to be up permanently. That's what Night of the Dead is for. Ghouls have always had the ability to Explode though. Master of Ghouls was only ever intended to have a pet bar for players that wanted extra control over exactly what the Ghoul did. Hence 1 talent point. Corpse Explosion is supposed to be Nature damage. That's just a bug. Bone Shield and the other two tanking abilities are supposed to be short cooldown buffs you can throw on yourself, like Icebound Fortitude. They aren't intended to be permanently up as passive mitigation. We are going to keep tweaking the numbers until they are approximately equal but because they do such different things, that isn't just simple math. We raised the cooldown on Army of the Dead because we found tanks were basically waiting for it to do any boss pulls. It's supposed to be an emergency ability, not something you bust out every fight. From looking at other forums, it sounds like several abilities for all classes are broken. We don't do a ton of testing on them because we want to get stuff out in a timely fashion, but with so many people pouring so much content into the game at once, it can sometimes happen. :( Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 27. Re: Frost Tweaks   08/21/2008 04:51:19 PM PDT Integrating Hungering Cold into a standard rotation hasn't a big design goal for us. It's designed more for emergencies and special cases. I don't think we'd want to give DKs an ability to do a massive group freeze every pull. We think making a decision between Frost Strike and Hungering Cold is fine. We lowered the cooldown on Howling Blast and it's possible we can lower it some more. But it hits big and crits bigger, so if we got to the point where you were throwing out 3 a rotation, that would be bad (though not for the DK). I think in this case, having it hit hard is more fun than having it hit often. We aren't trying to design the trees so that e.g. Frost never uses Obliterate. They are the exact same cost for a reason. The only exceptions are Heart Strike and Scourge Strike which are intended to completely replace thier analogs. Having finally made Frost Strike fun on runic power, I don't think we'd be likely to change it again. It was an unloved button for too long. Now I generally only hear complaints about Scourge Strike (which I think we solved) and possibly Icy Touch and Deathstrike (and maybe Obliterate) not doing enough damage. Frost can already Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Howling Cold -> Obliterate with Blood of the North, so I'm not sure why their rotations feel any more awkward than anyone else's. But feel free to enlighten me if I'm just missing something. It is entirely possible that Frost's dps just can't keep up, which would be a lot of fun to fix up by letting Icy Touch and friends hit a lot harder. Frost used to be a blast for big crits (esp. against wounded targets) so I'm not sure why it fell out of grace except that Blood started doing a lot / too much damage. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 14. Re: Why am I all green?   08/21/2008 10:46:42 PM PDT We have no idea where the +green came from. Enjoy it (or not) while you can. :) Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 2. Re: Death knight tanking impressions   07/28/2008 05:34:04 PM PDT Useful feedback. Thanks. :) I don't know if this was true in your situation, but one thing I have noticed is that the death knights who have leveled quickly tend to be grouping with veteran characters in epic gear. It's tough to test threat generation of a death knight in Shadowmoon quest blues against dps classes in T4 or better gear. If you're getting trounced by Ingvar, that is probably a problem with the dungeon and not the guys you're running with. The earlier instances need to be reasonably easy, especially since a lot of players will be running them in Borean Tundra greens. We haven't made a big pass comparing threat, dps and mitigation among all the classes yet, frankly because the abilities haven't stabilized enough yet. Fortunately with the death knight in particular, there are a lot of knobs to turn. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 14. Re: Rune Strike:   08/21/2008 10:16:02 PM PDT It sounds like the data is older than I thought. It should be off the GCD and any melee ability should benefit from AP and other melee stats. It's a fun ability. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 1. Re: Talent Coherency and Death Knight tanking   08/06/2008 11:48:03 PM PDT 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. Illifar Player 0. Feedback on all specs after todays patch.   08/21/2008 11:11:05 PM PDT After playing all three specs today post-patch, I figured I'd post what I've noticed so far. Blood Overall, nerfed. After logging in, I couldn't figure out what changed that made my survivability so different from before. Apparently the change to bloodworms and reducing the health we get back from blood presence(not aura) was enough. I'd say it still has the most solo survivability of the three. Blood worms: Nerfing the proc rate was fine, and fixing the amount of healing was fine, but together make it 3 wasted points. They used to heal you, now they just aggro @*#% and get in your way. Blood Aura: I never had this talent, partly because I didn't group as blood, partly because it reset all the time before, but this seems like another over nerf. 2% of damage done is really, really crappy. Heart Strike: Eh...not that big of a deal. Might of Mograine: I guess this was overdue. Obliterate seems like more of an option instead of a necessity. Blood Boil: I love the new blood boil, it's amazing. Great change. Unholy Shortly after I logged in I went to tank Utgarde as unholy. I was excited to see the changes to Unholy Blight since they appear great, but found it to be a nuisance. Unholy Blight: Seems like you overdid it, like the change to Death Coil RP cost last patch, and most of the changes to blood this patch. You're always so close to the perfect balance. The changes to unholy blight look great, till you pull with 0 RP. We can't generate enough RP from using all 6 runes to put up UB or even a death coil. That leaves 10 seconds of auto attacking. No runes, no RP, you're a sitting duck. Any time I pulled from scratch, one of the DPS had a good chance of pulling aggro. On a side note, was RP generation changed again this patch? Seems slower. Bone Armor: I never looked at this as something that should be up all the time, but a 1 minute cooldown is a bit much. Maybe 5 charges or 45 second cooldown. Ghouls: I'm sure there's enough feedback elsewhere on the forums. They're weird. Scourge Strikes new icon is pretty sweets. Night of the Dead: I didn't even try this because it looks bugged/useless. "Your next 10 plaguestrikes and scourge strikes lower the cooldown of raise dead by 30/1m". Your next 10? No cooldown shown? What? Not sure what's going on here, maybe someone who's tried it after the patch can explain. Unholy Command: I know you've said you just sort of push the patches when you feel like you have enough content to make a patch, but removing our taunts and then having a talent to increase a new taunt we don't even have....I dunno. Would be nice to hear what Demand does. Frost Honestly seems like the other specs were heavily nerfed and Frost was buffed a ton so we would all test it. Yes, pre-patch it was pretty weak, but now people are calling it the new Ret. I won't go in to details, a lot of people are testing Frost now with the changes and there should be sufficient feedback from someone more interested in the spec. Overall, Frost got too much love and Blood/Unholy got a lot of tough love. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 1. Re: Feedback on all specs after todays patch.   08/21/2008 11:50:46 PM PDT Thanks for the feedback. Q u o t e: Blood Aura: I never had this talent, partly because I didn't group as blood, partly because it reset all the time before, but this seems like another over nerf. 2% of damage done is really, really crappy. Two percent... to the entire raid. Q u o t e: Unholy Blight: Seems like you overdid it, like the change to Death Coil RP cost last patch, and most of the changes to blood this patch. You're always so close to the perfect balance. The changes to unholy blight look great, till you pull with 0 RP. We can't generate enough RP from using all 6 runes to put up UB or even a death coil. That leaves 10 seconds of auto attacking. No runes, no RP, you're a sitting duck. Any time I pulled from scratch, one of the DPS had a good chance of pulling aggro. I wouldn't always pull with Unholy Blight if that's what you mean. Six Runes generally = 50 RP. Death Coil = 40 RP. That assumes no talents to improve generation. Q u o t e: On a side note, was RP generation changed again this patch? Seems slower. It's exactly the same except for a buff to one of the runic power generating talents. Death Coil and Frost Strike are cheaper. Night of the Dead: I didn't even try this because it looks bugged/useless. "Your next 10 plaguestrikes and scourge strikes lower the cooldown of raise dead by 30/1m". Your next 10? No cooldown shown? What? Not sure what's going on here, maybe someone who's tried it after the patch can explain. Look at the cooldown on Rais Dead. After 1 Plague Strike, the cooldown goes down to 4.5 min. After another Plague Strike, it goes down to 4 min. After 10 Plague Strikes, you can use Raise Dead again and Army of the Dead only has a 10 min cooldown. Q u o t e: Frost Honestly seems like the other specs were heavily nerfed and Frost was buffed a ton so we would all test it. Yes, pre-patch it was pretty weak, but now people are calling it the new Ret. Ah you give us too much credit for planning all these things out. Actually, not much changed to affect Frost's damage IIRC. The big changes were a new talent to buff some Frost spells, more damage on Icy Touch, a lower cooldown on Howling Blast and raising Merciless Combat to 35% from 20%. But perhaps I forgot something. Demand (or whatever it's called now) = Taunt. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 3. Re: Are DKs going to get a new Taunt skill?   08/21/2008 04:57:53 PM PDT Pestilence still spreads diseases. Blood Boil does damage to an area per disease. It is very similar to Blood Strike, but affects an area (and doesn't hit as hard as a result). Making it a more core ability let us tie more talents to it. Pestilence and Blood Boil play really nice together. We gave DKs a new taunt and changed Death Grip to work like Mocking Blow (it makes the target attack you, but doesn't change your threat). As we started dealing with tanking some more, we were worried that a druid and warrior-like taunt is just too fundamental a tool. Because Death Grip has some massive PvP implications, we risked the DK taunt getting pushed to a longer cooldown if we ever needed to change Death Grip. The old Blood Boil would always be awkward to use as a taunt since it required one or two attacks before it to really work. At the moment there is no true Challenging Shout, but Army of the Dead is pretty good for using in those situations because the ghouls all taunt, which will save any healers or casters in trouble. It is probably an overpowered ability currently, but at least you won't be disappointed when you hit 80. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 27. Re: Frost Tweaks   08/21/2008 04:51:19 PM PDT Integrating Hungering Cold into a standard rotation hasn't a big design goal for us. It's designed more for emergencies and special cases. I don't think we'd want to give DKs an ability to do a massive group freeze every pull. We think making a decision between Frost Strike and Hungering Cold is fine. We lowered the cooldown on Howling Blast and it's possible we can lower it some more. But it hits big and crits bigger, so if we got to the point where you were throwing out 3 a rotation, that would be bad (though not for the DK). I think in this case, having it hit hard is more fun than having it hit often. We aren't trying to design the trees so that e.g. Frost never uses Obliterate. They are the exact same cost for a reason. The only exceptions are Heart Strike and Scourge Strike which are intended to completely replace thier analogs. Having finally made Frost Strike fun on runic power, I don't think we'd be likely to change it again. It was an unloved button for too long. Now I generally only hear complaints about Scourge Strike (which I think we solved) and possibly Icy Touch and Deathstrike (and maybe Obliterate) not doing enough damage. Frost can already Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Howling Cold -> Obliterate with Blood of the North, so I'm not sure why their rotations feel any more awkward than anyone else's. But feel free to enlighten me if I'm just missing something. It is entirely possible that Frost's dps just can't keep up, which would be a lot of fun to fix up by letting Icy Touch and friends hit a lot harder. Frost used to be a blast for big crits (esp. against wounded targets) so I'm not sure why it fell out of grace except that Blood started doing a lot / too much damage. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 5. Re: Obliterate and pve   08/21/2008 10:38:08 PM PDT Obliterate should not wipe anyone else's diseases. That's not a fun dynamic. In general, the references to "diseases" on the death knight should refer to your diseases. We get weird scaling problems when it doesn't. Part of our push is to get lots of different classes into groups, so having DKs want to bring more DKs along works against that. Ghostcrawler Blizzard Poster 25. Re: [Suggestion] Upgrade Scourge Strike   08/19/2008 07:13:39 PM PDT We will probably add an Unholy talent to reliably generate Death Runes. That has proven to be a pretty fun mechanic. At the moment it would probably really only benefit a DK with Bone Shield and / or Corpse Explosion. The idea of having Scourge Strike be an Obliterate upgrade has come up a few times, and it does have some benefits (especially if you do something like have Scourge Strike not remove diseases). It does turn Unholy into a rotation a little like Frost though, with the double FU ability on every other rotation. I have had trouble figuring out how Scourge Strike as BU would work. It would be nice on times when you had Death Runes, but with a normal rotation, I'm concerned you'd see something like: Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Scourge Strike -> Blood Strike... er Icy Touch again? You'd have a similar problem with the proposal to have Scourge Strike renew Frost Fever. Freeing up a Frost Rune doesn't help you that much unless you want to Chains of Ice. There is also an idea to make Scourge Strike FU but apply both diseases. Then you could do Scourge Strike -> Blood Strike -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate, at least when in melee. But... Heart Strike is pretty fun as a pure replacement for Blood Strike, so there is also a pretty decent reason to leave Scourge Strike as is. :) Blue post by Ghostcrawler 07/31/2008 We're almost ready to show the updated death knight talent tree. It was quite an overhaul but we're pretty excited about it. In case the talent trees go out before a new data push, I wanted to explain what we're trying to do here. We revamped the DK to have a standard rotation that used all the runes intelligently. Then we tweaked a lot of other abilities to be able to swap out one for another with similar rune costs. Some talented abilities can be used situationally for this purpose, while others just flat out replace one of the core abilities. I don't want to give the impression that "standard rotation" means the DK loses all its depth (or that the game forces you to use this rotation at all). On the contrary it feels like you are making an intelligent decision about what to do next instead of just randomly pounding abilities when they light up. 1) Icy Touch -- 1 Frost -- Pull a mob and get a Frost Fever disease on it. 2) Plague Strike -- 1 Unholy -- Get a Blood Plague disease on the enemy. 3) Blood Strike -- 1 Blood -- Do extra damage for getting both diseases up. 4) Blood Strike -- 1 Blood -- Do extra damage for getting both diseases up. 5) Obliterate -- 1 Frost, 1 Unholy -- Your diseases are going to expire soon, so time for a big hit. 6) Death Coil -- Runic Power -- You probably have enough Runic Power by now. Those are the basics, but you can swap out those moves as you see fit. If you're wounded, instead of Obliterate for Step 5, you can Death Strike instead for the same cost. Or you can Chains of Ice. Or Howling Blast. If you are deep Blood, you can Heart Strike instead of Blood Strike for bigger damage and an all new debuff. If you are deep Frost, you can use Blood of the North to earn 2 Death Runes and then get 2 Obliterates next time around. Or you can Frost Strike instead of Death Coil, especially if the target is really wounded and you also have Merciless Combat.