#0 - July 18, 2010, 7:49 a.m.
The Rune Interface
This needs to be updated it's currently awful. I don't know if the current UI in beta is bugged or what but it's not working well to determine when you actually have runes available. Most of the time to UI is telling me my runes are available when they are not. The runes are also very tiny and hard to see, and the system overall is just bad and needs to be updated.
What You Told Us In The Preview
We were told that the reason you were changing our system was so that you could add new abilities to it. The question that is on all of our minds is.......Where are the new abilities? So far there hasn't been one new ability added. There is nothing new to press when runes are on cooldown. I mean other then sudden doom being added to unholy which is a bad version of Rime there is nothing new to do?
We were told that cost on abilities would be evaluated and changed, and that some abilities would probably just be made free. Well other then Death & Decay, Howling Blast, and Scourge Strike (This is another terribad change I will get into later) what has been done? All the abilities that most DKs thought should lose their cost like Bone Shield, Vampiric Embrace, Strangulate still have rune cost attached to them?
Where was the evaluation? Currently on live in pvp if I want to use Strangulate the choice is between giving up a really bad damage ability to silence. In beta it's a decent damage ability vs. a silence. The difference is on live I have two blood runes available to me where as in beta I only have one.
Runic Empowerment
Q u o t e:
Q. It seems that our DPS with Runic Empowerment is very random, will that be changed?
A. Runic Empowerment is being changed to a trained ability so that all specializations can access it without feeling forced to, since we see it as a core part of death knight gameplay in Cataclysm. The way the talent is engineered, it should never disrupt your rotation, but rather give you bonus resources layered on top of your rotation. The proc rate is high enough that the actual variability in procs over time shouldn’t be excessive.
This had me really scratching my head. Do you guys not understand that one rune returns are useless to us especially in the new system? DKs deal damage with pairs of runes. The only runes attacks that require one rune are AoE abilities and disease applicators. We have a talent that extends diseases to 45s. So what is the purpose of this talent? Why would we want to spam disease applicators?
It seems you do not understand why we hate this talent currently. It is because all it results in is Icy Touch and Plague Strike spam. Unless we have two runes available this talent doesn't do anything of use.
The only way this talent can be worthwhile is if it returned a Death Rune and if Death Runes allowed you to use any attack for the cost of only that Death Rune. Outside of that this talent just seems pointless.
Scourge Strike
Oh yeah the Light Well of the Death Knight class. This ability is currently atrocious in beta. It does horrible damage, and on top of it with the rune cost reduction turns Unholy into ShadowFrost 4.0. All Unholy does in beta is spam Icy Touch because there is nothing to use Frost Runes on but that attack. This makes no sense because again there is a talent that extends diseases to 45secs in the Unholy tree and Icy Touch is a disease applicator. So why are we having to spam a disease applicator over and over again for damage? Do you plan to address this?
Overall after months of playing with the new system in Alpha and now Beta it just seems like pure fail. Nothing that was told to us regarding new abilities has happen. There have been no new abilities added, and the cost on abilities are still there with not one ability having it's cost completely removed.
Sitting around with nothing to do isn't very fun, and that is pretty much the DK rotation in beta unless you are Unholy where it's Icy Touch spam non-stop /sigh.
