DKs, downtime and Cataclysm

#0 - May 8, 2010, 3:05 p.m.

So I made a post about this when the changes were first announced, but it got lost in the sea of QQ that came with the class previews.

I don't know how accurate this is, but I saw this info in another thread:

Q u o t e:
1. Every Strike has had its damage roughly doubled, such as Scourge Strike going from 70% weapon damage to 140% weapon damage, to account for only being able to cast half as many of them at a time.

2. Runic power dumps such as Death Coil and Frost Strike have been given short cooldowns (5 seconds for DC, 6 seconds for FS), to account for changes in the rotation timings. That is, you're probably going to have a lot of dead time with the rune system, and with Frost Strike being buffed to 110% weapon damage, hitting 3 of them back-to-back could be very bad news.

3. Diseases spread via Pestilence now only deal half damage, probably to prevent Fury Warrior-esque scaling of incidental damage

4. Diseases now last 30 seconds baseline

5. Death and Decay only costs a single Blood rune

6. Summon Gargoyle now costs FU runes

This is troubling to me, because the reason I love my DK so much is it's fast, GCD capped playstyle - I like always having something to do, it's a major part of the fun of the class for me (and I believe many others feel the same way).

I understand that the point is to give us more burst in PvP and that our overall DPS should still be competitive with these changes, but if there's going to be a lot more down time on DK DPS it's really going to ruin the fun of the class for me. Longer rune cool downs combined with a cool down on our RP dumps? Really? Especially considering Frost's mastery bonus will basically cap out at 1 frost strike per six seconds. (not hard to achieve that RP considering how runes work, unless this part of the system gets a radical overhaul).

3-4. Good, smart changes.

5. Neat. Curious how this turns out.

6. Please, for the love of god leave it as an RP cool down. Rune based cool downs are incredibly frustrating.

Ghostcrawler

#31 - May 9, 2010, 6:38 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I apologize if this post seems like a knee jerk post. The intent was mostly to discuss what DKs actually want out of their class come cataclysm, I realize now framing that discussion in light of alpha phase changes and unclear information was the wrong way to do it.

First, be realistic that the community is never going to rally around a single vision for a class, or really any design change we're considering. For every player who liked the fast pace of having to hit a button every GCD, there were plenty of others who found it tedious, repetitive and exhausting. I'm just asking you to be realistic about the accuracy of posts you read that say "Nobody was asking for this" or "This is not what we want."

The main goal of the resource change is to buy DKs some free GCDs. Currently some abilities just can't compete, even if free, because you don't have the GCD to use that button. However, it's also not the goal that DKs stand around doing nothing for long stretches because all their runes are used up and everything else is on cooldown. Being GCD locked isn't a fun place to be, for any class. You can't vary your actions at all -- in fact you are often such a slave to those actions that you have tunnel vision for your UI (even if modded) and can't react to the dynamic nature of most encounters these days. If anything messes up your rotation, say you have to move or are temporarily CC'd, then everything just falls apart.

We don't get every change in place before making an alpha or beta build. It's much like the way large patches roll out but to an even greater degree -- you'll see some changes, then some more, until the rate of change ultimately slows down right before ship. There are very few Cataclysm mechanics, and no classes, that we think are "done" yet.

Ghostcrawler

#282 - May 12, 2010, 5:18 p.m.

The point is not that we want a DK to hit a yellow attack then sit around waiting until they can do something fun again.

The point is that we have no room to add anything to the DK rotation. If we wanted to add "clearcasting" style procs or cooldowns finishing sooner or runes regenerating sooner, we can't really do that because the DK doesn't have room in a very tight rotation to use those abilities. If you try and use your GCD on anything else, then the whole rotation collapses because then your runes aren't coming back at the right time or your diseases are expiring or whatever.

Imagine 1-4 are rotational abilities like Icy Touch and Blood Strike and F = "fun thing".

DK rotation today: 1233331233334123333123333
DK rotation in Cataclysm: 123333-F-12-F-33334123333-F-