PVP Death Knight Changes: Wrong Direction

#0 - Feb. 19, 2010, 10:49 p.m.

# Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.
# Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100%.
# Talents

* Blood

o Abomination's Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.
o Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

* Frost

o Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength. The previous functionality of this talent can now be attained via the Glyph of Chains of Ice.
o Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.
o Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.
o Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

* Unholy

o Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight's diseases on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to the target should stay the same.

These changes are actually a nerf, I'll have given up on Blizzard if these changes go through in their present state.

Ghostcrawler

#27 - Feb. 20, 2010, 12:27 a.m.

Until we get closer to the patch, the notes you see are going to be a work in progress largely based on whenever the team decides to cut a build.

One change we have made in the interim is to make Chains of Ice apply Frost Fever baseline, and keep the current (live) Glyph of Chains of Ice as is (causing damage). If you don't change your PvP spec at all (and assuming you have a pretty cookie-cutter PvP spec), then you should see extra damage from the Strength in Endless Winter and a Scourge Strike that hits harder on undiseased targets.

If the Mind Freeze from Endless Winter isn't important to you, then you might have a few more points to spend in deep Unholy or early Blood.

We're going to continue to iterate until we're ready for 3.3.3 to go live, so there is no guarantee that these will be the final changes we go with. As always, your feedback (particularly feedback that is constructive, succinct, and using the kinds of words adults use) is appreciated.

Ghostcrawler

#28 - Feb. 20, 2010, 12:28 a.m.

Q u o t e:
The endless winter change would actually be fine if chains of ice applied frost fever baseline.

Then it would just be a 4% str increase.

Tying it to a major glyph and thus deleting one of the two most common 3rd glyph choices and eliminating the ability to use anything else at all in that third glyph spot is a huge mistake and a net nerf.

Heh. Yeah that is pretty much how things work currently.

Ghostcrawler

#46 - Feb. 20, 2010, 1:13 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Why not just reduce the base Mind Freeze cost to something a bit more reasonable, that way the Endless Winter talent doesn't feel like such a requirement.

That was the kind of thing we were looking at with the initial change to Endless Winter. However, assuming you want Icy Reach, Black Ice and Lichborne, it probably only frees you up 4 or so talent points anyway. You could spend those on Subversion I suppose, but we didn't see a really juicy PvP talent that DKs were currently denied from having that was now accessible with a few more points. We thought giving all of those Frost abilities base was too generous -- they were tucked down in Frost in the first place to make sub-specing attractive.