Some DK ideas for 3.3 - Blue Tracker

#0 - March 12, 2010, 6:01 p.m.

Ok had to put alot of this down on paper before i posted so idont leave anything out. First TY for the buffs we're getting to unholy. They will be very helpful. Ok to the matter at hand. As you know the other 2 DK specs are hurting even worse than unholy ever was. I spent a couple hours brainstorming things that may help with out overpowering either of the other 2 specs and still leave them behind unholy in most scenarios, but would def help open up a few diff comps for us.

I'll do these in sections first with class wide changes and then changes to individual trees. I'm also open for any ideas other experienced DK's might have and will add them to the list as long as they are within reason. (That means NO mortal strike ideas :p)

Class Wide

Perm Ghoul- Ok Dk's have a wide array of tools. We all know this, but both blood and frost are missing this important gap closer/interrupt/peel. Yes gnaw can be all of those things. Tthe other trees already have huge issues staying on target once DG is on CD it's gg unless ur unholy with desecration and gnaw at your disposal. Believe me the lack of a pet is huge to Blood and Frost.

Unholy is the magic damage tree hence the garg doing magic attacks and Unholy Blight. The Ghoul is all physical damage and it would be wonderful to open it up to the other trees. It wouldn't have a negative or OP effect on pve at all since blood and frost could both use the extra damage to compete with unholy as it reigns king of both pvp and pve.

My idea to fix this would be to simply make ghoul a baseline summon ability. Again this is not overpowering in pve since blood and frost are crushing DM's in any great guild. And the only thing the other specs get is a 3 sec stun every minute. 3 seconds. C'mon u can give blood and frost a 3 second stun.

Blood

Obviously the problem of dispels is killing this spec just as much as unholy. If u can admit dispels were hurting DK's then you should know that means all specs of DK's not just unholy. Unless your plans were to test it on the PTR for unholy first and see how it worked out and then open it up to the other trees i'm not sure why make such a drastic change for unholy alone in a class where every single tree has the same problem.

The fix for this is not a one shot move like Perm Ghoul. Again i've tried my best to keep any of these from crossing the line to OP, and as far as disease protection goes I have come up with only 2 possible solutions with out having that happen.

First Unhly blight is a basline ability that does no damage but along with the dispel protection it provides, it also decreases the afflicted targets ablility to hit by 3% for 7 seconds. That would be something that all specs of a dk would love to bring to a raid. Or if that seems a little lackluster:

Unholy Blight: Grants 100% disease protection and causes the afflicted target to deal 5-10% less damage for 8- 10 seconds.

Now to give unholy its damage back from a damageless UB. Simply use the talent for adjustments i.e
Your unholy blight now causes 10% of the intial Death Coil damage over 10 secs. It also allows you to buff unholy damage if need be or tone down with just that talent. You can increase it to 15-20% if unholy is too low or drop it to 5% if it's to high

There is only one more thing that i can think of for blood to make it viable again, not top but just viable at all. The synergy between COI and Glyph of Heart Strike (GHS). I really liek the glyph of heart strike. but the fact that its over written with COI is insurmountable.

Say for instance I'm on a rogue GHS goes up he gouges me and gets some distance. I use COI and his priest dispels it. That's it. GG. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that scenario, but unholy doesnt have that problem because COI synergizes perfectly with desecration same scenario and im unholy the priest dispel the rogue but he's still trapped in desecration and can't get too far. Very simple fix just change the coding to allow GHS to be active while COI is. Also allow the cleaved target to be afflicted too. That is only 2 ppl at any one moment that blood can slow, so don't even think about that being too much when desecration has no limit to the amount of ppl it can slow down.

That's it for now I will do some more thinking on my frost ideas since i found a problem with one and report back. I'll also include any other great ideas i hear, or change any of mine that are proven faulty or not in the best interest of the class (which is why i left out MS :P)

Grammar

#12 - March 15, 2010, 5:35 p.m.

We left the ghoul as an Unholy focus because not every player wants to have a pet. We already have two mandatory pet classes in the game.

We want to see how the Unholy Blight change plays out. We realize it offers more PvP viability for Unholy than the other two specs, though to be fair, Unholy was already a lot more common in PvP. We didn't want to implement three distinct mechanics of disease resistance just to see what stuck, because then it felt like we'd have to support them all forever instead of iterating on a single one that we like. If the Unholy Blight model works, then it's something we'd consider giving to all DKs in the long-term.

Really though, we don't think the answer is to have a continuing arms race of dispels and dispel protection. This is why we've been so reluctant to implement a DK change in the first place, especially one that we ideally won't need in the future. The way things are headed, one could easily imagine the 4.0 glyph or talent that says "Your dispels now dispel stuff that normally can't be dispelled" and the 5.0 version that says "No, really, nothing can dispel your debuffs now," and the 6.0 one that said "Just kidding. You can dispel everything again."

We like the general concept of dispels as a counter. Making a good decision to spend resources (including GCDs) based on what another player is doing is what allows players to win because of their skill and not just because of their gear. The problem is that dispels were designed around (antiquated) PvE content such as Molten Core, where spamming dispels was something we asked you to do frequently. A better world would be one in which a dispel was a meaningful choice, meaning they would have a real mana cost and require you to actually push a button. There needs to be a cost for dispelling at the wrong time, just as there's a cost for using your trinket or Ice Block at the wrong time. If we make this change, we'd balance the PvE encounters accordingly, such as asking you to occasionally dispel big curses (or whatever) instead of constantly remove spammy, aggravating ones.