Upcoming Death Knight Changes

We have talked about making some of these changes and wanted to provide more details. You should be able to try these out yourselves on the PTR before they go live.

Our reason for most of these changes should be obvious, but some common themes are:
-- Making tanking still rely on cooldowns, but rely on them a little less.
-- Make Blood a more attractive spec, and particularly for tanking.
-- Chill out some of the defensive capabilities all DKs have in PvP.
-- Avoid having to use Death and Decay as an out-of-combat runic power generator.

1) Rune Strike -- damage decreased from 200% to 150% but threat increased to 150% from 100%.
2) All multi-rune abilities generate 15 runic power.
3) Anti-Magic Shell -- cooldown lowered to 45 sec from 60 sec.
4) The healing of Blood Aura, Blood Presence and Death Pact has been doubled.
5) Bone Shield -- mitigation reduced from 40% to 20%.
6) Icebound Fortitude – now reduces damage by 20% instead of 50%. The amount of damage reduced increases with bonus Defense (to about 35% for 540 Defense, but it can go higher). The stun immunity is intended to be its primary role in PvP.
7) Frost Presence -- bonus armor increased from 60 to 80% and magic damage reduction increased from 5 to 15%. We wanted to reduce the effectiveness of cooldowns but bring up base mitigation to reduce damage spikiness.
8) Corpse Explosion -- damage increased substantially, added 5 sec cooldown, and changed cost to 40 runic power.
9) Heart Strike – we overhauled this ability. It no longer has a haste debuff but will now be able to strike two targets like a cleave. It still hits for more than Blood Strike, but you can still use Blood Strike if e.g. you don’t want to break CC.
10) Horn of Winter -- now has no cost and grants 10 runic power in addition to its stat buff, but has a 30 sec cooldown.
11) Night of the Dead -- now grants 40/70% passive area spell avoidance to your pet in addition to its current effects.
12) Outbreak – this talent no longer receive bonus damage from Pestilence. The bonus from Plague Strike and Blood Boil has been increased slightly.
13) Bloody Strikes – the bonus damage from Pestilence has been moved here to help Blood AE slightly.
14) Pestilence -- no longer has a 10 sec cooldown.
15) Raise Dead -- now split into two spells: Raise Dead now raises a ghoul or pet ghoul (if talented). Raise Ally now raises a fallen party member (at no reagent cost).
16) New runeforge rune -- Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (two-handed only) now grants 25 Defense and 2% Stamina.
17) Shadow of Death -- duration reduced from 45 seconds to 25 seconds.
18) Unholy Blight, Dancing Rune Weapon and Hungering Cold – cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power.
19) Vampiric Blood -- in addition to its current effects, also adds 20% health temporarily.
20) Will of the Necropolis -- now reduces the damage of any attack that takes the DK below 35% health by 5 /10/15% instead of boosting armor when wounded,
21) Many death knight glyphs have been changed. In many cases the negative consequences were removed.
22) New death knight sigils are now available, primarily from vendors, including a tanking-oriented sigil.

The 25 defense on the runeforge enchant is skill, not rating. Swordshattering is probably a better enchant if you can stay uncrittable. A lot of DKs starting raiding or getting Naxx gear were not in that situation. But warriors always played games with how they handled defense. Putting a lot of defense on your weapon might allow you to wear a dps piece somewhere else with a lot of hit for example.

Raise Ally still raises the players as a ghoul.

We don't think DKs are in danger of hitting the armor cap with this change. Shields typically provide a lot of armor that they lack. It's possible DKs could get close (in content not yet released) but only by seriously gimping all other stats to just stack armor. It won't be a situation like druids were in in BC where hitting the cap was relatively common and inadvertent.

Q u o t e:
By buffing Frost Presence so significantly they're removing the RNG aspect of Bone Shield. Really I think the design intent behind Bone Shield is to work more like a Warrior's Shield Block than a permanent mitigation buff that has to be refreshed every x seconds. You use it to help smooth incoming damage but you are unable to keep it up 100% of the time.

That was our logic. Depending on the encounter, Bone Shield should be something you save for a big burst of damage, like Shield Block or Barskskin. The way it felt was more like equipping a shield at all.

Put another way, death knights need to be able to survive without Bone Shield and then use Bone Shield as needed. The way it felt was that anytime Bone Shield was down, the end was near.