Simple DK Questions and Concerns

#0 - Aug. 29, 2010, 5:48 a.m.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is it not, so I doubt Ferals will mind if I borrow their successful (in terms of interesting and productive discussion generated) thread format for Death Knight related issues!

What could it hurt?

1. Although all of our rune-based abilities which deal damage were adjusted for the new rune system, the same can't be said for non-damage abilities (such as tank CDs and forms of utility like Strangulate or Chains), leaving them proportionally more expensive for the same effect. Will this be tackled in some manner for at least some of them?

2. Is Runic Empowerment supposed to encourage the use of IT/PS even when not applying diseases?

3. Blood Boil's single blood rune cost makes it a pain for Unholy to use (since their Unholy runes will go to SS and DnD, leaving their Frost runes out in the cold). Will this be addressed somehow?

4. Howling Blast is designed to be used in both single target and AoE, so how do you balance its damage since (in its current form) it deals the same in either scenario? Balance around one mob, and it's OP when there's several. Balance around several and it's laughable when there's one.

5. Rune Strike's as integral to tank threat as ever, but hasn't received any compensation (in terms of increased damage or lowered cost) for the global avoidance nerf of Cataclysm. Is this intended (i.e, to shift some threat from RS to DC) or will something be done?

6. Improved Icy Touch, Annihilation, Necrosis, Corrupting Strikes, and Morbidity are all passive, damage increases of the sort which were presumably meant to be eliminated - are they slated for removal/renovation?

7. Virulence is a spell hit talent for a primarily melee class. Will it get the ret paladin treatment or some such thing?

8. Icy Reach is a spell range talent for a primarily melee class. Actual casters got their range talents removed (or folded into other talents); surely we can expect at least that much considering how much less valuable ours is for us in comparison?

9. What's up with the current form of Dirge? Between Outbreak, Scourge Strike, and Festering Strike, we'll not use PS/IT/BS in 95% of scenarios, so the talent may as well have been deleted.

10. Do you acknowledge the fact that both Frost and Unholy (particularly the 2H variant of the first and the DW version of the second) are incredibly GCD capped? Easy enough to show/prove if it's in doubt, but a large issue in direct contradiction of stated design philosophy for Cataclysm, so certainly needs fixing.

11. Will Scarlet Fever get the Vindication treatment (i.e, both a single target and AoE ability applying it)? Otherwise, it makes it difficult for a DK tank to work around crowd-control when one of the most important damage debuffs breaks them! Although the attack speed debuff has the same issue, that issue is shared by all four tanks, not just beholden to one.

12. Will Unholy Frenzy get its health cost looked at? With the increased focus on personal survivability and healer mana conservation, UF's health hit seems unnecessarily high considering the buff isn't all that potent or special.

13. Unholy Presence and Frost Presence aren't quite balanced out, with the latter being stronger sans improving talents. Will this be tackled? The main issue is that UP affects your rotation so heavily that even if its superior, if there's even the slightest risk of GCD capping, we'll be better off just running in FP to open up the GCDs.

14. Blood's mastery and all that really props up Death Strikes, but then Death Rune Mastery goes and sacrifices them for additional Heart Strikes, which simply won't be worth it unless you're really needing that extra threat. Will DRM possibly be reversed, or simply removed?

15. Unholy as a whole is greatly favoring dual-wielding in its current state, due to a combination of different factors: the introduction of Sudden Doom, the easy accessibility of Nerves of Cold Steel, the buff to Necrosis, the non-weapon-dmg-related Mastery, the passive haste of UP, and so on. Is this intended?

Could always pose more, but these are the major ones presently facing the class in beta which has most testers a bit curious about what's the plan, so to speak, and thus the ones best suited for discussion.

Ghostcrawler

#46 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:15 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The biggest issue with Dks right now is that all these problems with the new trees and other things are being pointed out for Blizzard and their response is no response at all, or some lame excuse like Dks don't need work cause Dks have the newest trees since they only came out in wrath. I thought cataclysm beta was for all classes and all classes were going to be worked on. I'm not sure how the class that is the newest class was on the list of big three that started off with major changes Blizzard claimed with paladin and hunter now Dks aren't being smoothed over. So no real changes for over six weeks to two months for Dks.

We can sit here and keep saying to ourselves we know Blizzard won't forget us, but in reality with their lack of response and poor responses that Dks don't need work only prove that they have no plans to further work on Dks at all this beta which raises high concerns about the class going into cataclysm. I for one am not going to be willing to play this game with a broken class cause Blizzard neglected to bother making any fixes to Dks while they had the chance in beta.

So i'm done hoping Blizzard will look over the class. When changes are made they will be made and my mind might change about cataclysm. Till then i'm leaning away from this game.

You're also done posting for awhile. Don't fish. Don't QQ.

Ghostcrawler

#47 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:16 p.m.

There are a lot of questions in this thread, and I can't answer them all, but I can hit a few.

Is 2H Frost viability still intended? -- yes.
Is DW Unholy viability intended? -- no.

Pestilence has been nerfed too much -- Pestilence was always intended as a convenient way to spread diseases in anticipation for things like Blood Boil. It was not ever supposed to be the way DKs AE, and in fact that is the job of abilities like Blood Boil. If there was a way to make Pestilence cause no damage, we'd probably do it.

There are too many passive damage talents -- yes, we'd agree with that. It's still something we're working on. There will still be a few, especially high in the trees, but DKs are also slightly exempt (if such a thing exists) from our making sure that early talents are easy to understand for level 10 players.

DKs being GCD locked -- this is not something we see for DKs above level 80. We do see it for DKs who are converted at level 80 in Icecrown gear to the Cataclysm rules, for one simple reason -- a lot of your stats got converted to haste and you have no mastery. The equivalent would be a level 85 DK who decides to eschew all mastery on gear and stack haste to a ridiculous degree. Sure it might GCD lock you, but it's such a dps loss, why would you ever do that? This is actually a problem with many specs and skews feedback quite a bit. Be very careful in your feedback to distinguish between whether the character you are testing is wearing Lich King gear or Cataclysm gear. If we had to do it all again, maybe we would have converted some existing gear to mastery, just to avoid the situation we're in now where players are missing one of the big secondary stats.

Ghostcrawler

#48 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:20 p.m.

Q u o t e:
For one, I'd like to ask that people please don't center your posts around the idea that we're not getting any communication. The last thing we need is a good thread to get ignored/passed over because it's getting filled with a lot of posts complaining about how we're being ignored.

Yes. I had to delete a half dozen whiny posts from this thread because I wanted to post in it, but didn't want players to see "Oh, maybe whining gets results." If you don't make this kind of work for me, I'd have more time to actually answer threads.

P.S. I will continue to delete posts in this thread that are on how you feel ignored and not about DK mechanics specifically. Sorry to sound like a jerk, but I don't have the time to play forum police in a nice way.

Ghostcrawler

#50 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:27 p.m.

It's okay -- intended even -- for Frost to use ranged attack. The original "Shadowfrost" was an abomination that cherry picked select talents to boost Icy Touch to a ridiculous degree. If a Frost DK can be competitive without ever being in melee, then that crosses the line. If they are attacking at range before they close, or nuking a fleeing target, or at a second target while engaged with a first target, that's fine.

Ghostcrawler

#53 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:33 p.m.

I am reading the other thread too. It's mercifully free of QQ for the moment, so I'm hoping not to contaminate it.

Ghostcrawler

#55 - Aug. 30, 2010, 7:48 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The only damage that pestilence deals is from the diseases that it spreads. . . so does mean that ideally diseases spread by pestilence deal no damage and its purpose is to allow abilities to benefit from the diseases being present? But he also says that pestilence has been nerfed too much. . . now i'm confused!

Sorry. Typed too quickly.

Pestilence was designed back in the day when DKs had to use Blood Boil as their AE taunt (a truly brilliant design direction in retrospect). DKs needed a way to get diseases on many targets quickly without tab targeting Plague Strike on everyone. So Pestilence was invented to spread diseases, but based on that initial PS/IT so that it would not replace them.

However, because disease damage ended up being pretty beefy, especially for Unholy DKs, Pestilence became a quite powerful AE attack. Even worse, if was very hard for us to shackle it. It wasn't affected by the "half damage from AE" auras we put on some trash that we wanted to be more powerful, since Pestilence wasn't a real AE.

In short, we don't want Pestilence to be an AE at all. We want Blood Boil and Howling Blast and similar spells to be your primary source of AE damage. I'm not saying we'll change Pestilence at this stage because it would be pretty tricky to implement a design that let it spread diseases that did no damage (or something equally goofy). I'm just saying that our intent is not for Pestilence to be a huge chunk of your damage. It's ultimately a utility ability.