Thoughts on death knights

We’ve had a lot of questions about death knights recently. This is a new class, and while we’re thrilled overall with how it's been received, we always expected to have to make more changes to death knights than the classes that have had their talents under the microscope for many years.

We’re not prepared to announce specific changes to DKs yet, but here are some general areas we are tinkering with. Most of these changes apply predominantly to tanking death knights, so I avoided cross-posting this thread, but there are probably items of interest to dps specs as well.

1) Death knights seem to tank well when they have cooldowns available and take too much damage otherwise. The change here seems obvious – boost Frost presence’s mitigation while reducing the mitigation of some other abilities, especially Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield.

2) One idea we have for Icebound Fortitude is to scale the mitigation based on defense skill. This lets the ability be less of a paladin bubble in PvP for dps knights, while still letting it act more like Shield Wall for tanks. It also has the side effect of making defense slightly more attractive to death knights. (Let me add before it’s asked that yes we understand Ferals have this problem too and we are working on it.)

3) Unholy is a very popular tanking spec, largely on the strength of Bone Shield. Expect to see some buffs to tanking talents in the Blood tree especially.

4) Rune Strike was intended to be a reactive tanking tool, not a rogue killer. We will probably chill its weapon damage and increase its threat.

5) We don’t like the behavior where DKs feel like they are supposed to drop Death and Decay to generate runic power before a pull. It just looks goofy. We will probably lower the runic power costs of Unholy Blight and Horn of Winter, which seem to be the primary reasons to generate RP. Horn of Winter will probably be something like no cost, 30 sec cooldown, generates 10 rp.

EDIT: I am refering to using DnD outside of combat just for the runic power (kind of like Bloodrage for warriors). It's totally legit and intended to use it to start a fight to gain threat and hurt the bad guys.

6) There are some odd situations caused by Shadow of Death that we would like to fix. The talent isn’t designed to let you escape durability damage or rez by zoning into an instance.

7) There are some annoying parts of the non-pet ghoul. We want to lower the aggro range (for less accidental pulls) and spawn the ghoul in quicker when dismounting. The ghoul, at least Unholy’s version, could also use some AE avoidance like other pets.

8) We are probably going to add a new spell to let you raise fallen allies so that you don't have to make the decision between bringing back another player (which was just supposed to be a fun bonus) and bringing back your ghoul, which can be pretty crticial for some specs.

This isn't everything we're talking about of course, just a little preview.

Q u o t e:
Man, I was really hoping that general forums would be better and we'd see the maturity that was (generally at least) shown on the beta forums, but I suppose I was wrong.

GC, I'd like to propose heavier moderation - a lot of these posts are useless to everyone, especially other players.

I agree. This is not an appropriate place for mindless QQ or Blizzard conspiracy theories. If you think there will be a problem with some of the changes we're discussing, by all means bring them up. That is why we are mentioning them now. But please make sure your post is of some interest to other players or developers. Spare us the venting.

We've been a little gentle with the moderation so far because these role forums are a new experiment for all of us. I tend to delete junk and ban people who post it, but really you probably don't want me having to spend time doing that.

Now back to the actual issue...

There are some DK sigils missing from the game. At least one of these is tanking oriented. We plan on getting them back in soon (like the same patch with these other changes).

We are aware that DKs may be struggling more to get defense. They lack tanking weapons, shields and guns, all of which can provide defense to warriors. It's something we're working on.

We're also working on Blood AE.

We would change the Horn of Winter glyph (to something like duration).

I would not expect full itemization for two-handed tanking weapons. We wanted DKs to tank with dps two-handers (and have their mitigation benefit somewhat from the dps stats). We might add a craftable weapon or something down the road, but only if that felt like an option for the DK, not a mandatory piece of gear. You can also dual-wield tanking weapons if you want, but again, it isn't the intent that is the only way to play. (Please don't turn the rest of this thread into a discussion of whether or not DKs should be able to dual-wield.)

Rune Strike is a tanking ability. It was designed to let DKs make up for the fact that their threat suffers so much from hits that fail to land. It does suffer from a confusing tooltip (which we have since fixed) but it is the DK who must avoid the attack to get Rune Strike to light up.

We still like DKs as the "active abilities" tank. We just think it might be a little too extreme right now. Icebound Fortitude was intended to be something you use when a big, predictable damage spike is coming, but DK tanks seem to want to keep them up 100% of the time for fear that they will die without them.

We don't have a PvP role forum (though there is a PvP forum) for the specific reason that we wanted the ability to discuss PvP and PvE issues at once. I realize not every player is interested in PvP -- that's cool, not every player is interested in paladin tank mechanics either. But it is totally appropriate to discuss PvP issues in all 3 role forums. Obviously we don't want PvP (or PvE) discussions to dominate. PvP is a part of the game and we do make balance changes for PvP reasons. Obviously we don't want PvP (or PvE) balance to dominate. Please do not use the rest of this thread to refute any of those claims (though starting others is fine if you really feel the need).

Q u o t e:
I'm not going to read this whole thread (and likewise I'm sure the Dev's won't as well)

No, we actually do.

I know it's asking a lot for everyone to read long threads when you might have jobs and families and school (and WoW). Just realize that one reason these threads can get very long is a lot of players who just want to have their say without actually seeing how many people have said the same thing already. :)

There are many good comments in this thread. I can't respond to them all, so I just picked a few:

Q u o t e:
- Rune Strike's damage should not be nerfed, but it's threat should be increased

This makes the ability too good in PvP, which as I said, is a problem. I predict it will be something like 150% instead of 200% weapon damage, but 150% threat.

Q u o t e:
- if IBF is going to scale, make it scale off Res and Def

Again, this makes the ability too good in PvP if it scales of Resilience, which all serious PvP players have in abundance. In PvP you can just use it too often. In long boss fights, being able to use it often is cool. But PvP fights tend to be very short, which means you have IBF available a lot. Scaling it with def isn't intended to force you to stack def for PvP. It allows us to tone down the damage reduction for PvP overall while still ensuring that actual tanks can use it to tank.

I think my reference to the paladin bubble threw a lot of people. Of course the abilities aren't all that similar. What I meant was that IBF is being used too often in PvP to avoid damage. It's just too good an ability for a class with a lot of short-cooldown abilities.

Q u o t e:
- DK TPS is lower than other tanking classes

I don’t know if this is actually the case. I could believe it for Blood on multiple mobs, which is why we need to buff Blood tanking a little.

Q u o t e:
- Bone Shield is fine, dont nerf it. Buff Unbreakable Armor.

Bone Shield is not fine. When the cooldown is off, DKs are too squishy. If we buff their mitigation then Bone Shield turns them into the best tanks. We do plan on buffing Frost Presence’s armor and magic mitigation to compensate for nerfing Bone Shield. Your incoming damage should be the same, just smoother. We will also likely lower the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell a little. All of this still needs a lot of testing however.

Q u o t e:
- we need more sigils in the game. you can add tanking/dps sigils to Badge vendors.
- Reaching def cap is harder for a DK than a Warrio/Paladin due to 1H weapons and shields having defense + enchants. Add a static -1% crit immunity to Frost Presence

We are adding more Sigils. We will likely add a defense proc sigil too and a two-hander runeforge defense enchant. (Dual wield tanks already have lots of +defense weapons available.)

Q u o t e:
- Howling Blast's cooldown is too long and it's damage is too little, please buff it

In the beta, we found that it was hard to get Frost knights to use both Howling Blast and Obliterate. Too often they just went with Howling Blast over and over. The numbers may have changed enough since that time that it’s no longer a problem.

Q u o t e:

- make Scourge Strike equivalent to Frost Strike in that it can not be parried or dodged

Scourge Strike is one of the strongest abilities a death knight can get, so we’re not convinced it needs to be buffed. Frost Strike can’t be avoided because it competes against Death Coil, which can’t be avoided. Without the anti-avoidance, Frost death knights have trouble with threat. Unholy death knights can do strong Death Coils as well as Unholy Blight, so we don’t anticipate a problem here.

Q u o t e:
DKs will end up still going for Swordshattering once they no longer need the new Runeforge Defense enchant, which will make it just another bandaid fix.

Having a DK choose what kind of enchant most benefits them we think is actually a good thing. It's cooler if there is a legit choice in tanking enchant. While you might "graduate" from defense enchant to parry enchant, you might also decide to keep the defense enchant and replace some of your defense gear elsewhere. But even if all you do is graduate, it's still a gear decision players will make at some point. Bundling defense with parry would make Swordshattering even more OP.